


In The Blood

by saintroux



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: 2015-2016 NHL Season, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Feelings, M/M, Romance, Sexy blood drinking, Vampires In The NHL, past relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 07:47:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16471613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintroux/pseuds/saintroux
Summary: “What the fuck happened?” Sid asked, turning his head to Olli and Rusty, who were lingering wide-eyed behind him, watching the whole thing with fear and confusion.  But Sid could feel what had happened, the telltale raised bite under the hinge of Geno’s jaw.





	In The Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flamingo_sex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flamingo_sex/gifts).



> so many eternal thanks to s for the beta, literally more thanks than i can give. we performed open heart surgery and we made sure to fluff the pillows after. thank you for everything. you're the best.
> 
> to flamingo_sex, i was so struck by one of your prompts, and this didn't turn out 100% of the way that i intended, but i really hope it hits the sweet spot for you. <3

Sid awoke to frantic knocking. He thought at first that it might be coming from down the hall—some drunk idiot at whatever hour of the night it was now, but then it started up again and it was loud, and insistent, and clearly coming from the other side of his locked suite door.

He turned his phone over on the bedside table and squinted at the screen’s bright glow: 2:04 AM. Who the _fuck_ needed him at this hour?

Maybe there was a fire somewhere, he thought, swinging himself out of bed and rummaging around for some sweats to pull on. But he didn’t hear any alarms going off, or much of anything, really—he could hear the knocking still, the harsh breathing of whoever it was outside his door, the trash compactor working down on the street below.

He swung the door open and on the other side was Rusty, with a sheepish look on his face and his arm raised to knock, and Olli, lingering behind him, and—Geno?

“Sorry for waking you up, we uh—“ Rusty said, so fast and out of breath that Sid could barely understand. “Can we come in?”

Sid was half awake at most and so fucking confused. He stepped aside to let them barrel past him into the room: Rusty’s shoes leaving dark smears on the carpet, Olli dragging Geno in behind him, holding Geno’s arms around his chest like a sleeping child, and what the _fuck_.

Sid leaned over to click the light on, and when he did, everything seemed to hit him all at once. Geno’s hair was a ratty mess, pulled up in wet tufts, he had a purpling bruise on his cheek, and something muddy smeared down the line of his shirtsleeve. The whole expanse of his neck was smeared in blood, and Sid tried not to breathe it in too much, the smell of it blooming all around him, sharp and sweet.

Olli heaved Geno down onto the bed and Sid knelt down and reached out to touch his neck, smearing through the bloody mess to feel for his pulse, which was thumping weakly—thank god—under his fingers.

“What the fuck happened?” Sid asked, turning his head to Olli and Rusty, who were lingering wide-eyed behind him, watching the whole thing with fear and confusion. But Sid could feel what had happened, the telltale raised bite under the hinge of Geno’s jaw. Sid’s mouth tingled, his fangs trying to drop just thinking about it. It had been a long time since he’d been able to scent Geno’s blood like this—fresh and overwhelming—but he wasn’t sure he would ever forget.

“I don’t—“ Olli started to say. “We didn’t see him until after, I don’t know.”

Sid’s stomach twisted up into a knot thinking about it. Geno was historically incautious about letting people bite him, and he liked it too much, and Sid used to warn him about letting just _anyone_ —

But there wasn’t time to dwell on feeling morally superior for knowing what would happen if Geno wasn’t careful. It _had_ happened, and if Sid didn’t do something about it in the extremely immediate future, Geno might not even be around to hear him say “I told you so.”

“Can you get me something wet?” Sid asked, hoping that Rusty or Olli would make themselves useful instead of standing around gawking. He heard one of them patter off to the bathroom, and the tap rush on, and he turned back to Geno.

“Geno, can you hear me?” Sid said, mouth close to Geno’s ear. He put the back of his hand to Geno’s purpled cheek and didn’t feel it heat up like it should. “Geno,” he said again, jostling him until he scrunched his nose up and groaned.

“It’s Sid,” he said, and let Olli drop the wet cloth into his hand when he stepped close; it was dripping all over Sid’s knee like Olli hadn’t thought to wring it out. He pressed it against Geno’s neck, pulling his collar away to clean the mess up and trying not to think about how much he wanted to just use his mouth.

It was clear that whoever had bitten Geno had taken a lot, probably too much, and Sid could see it on him, the very early stages of transformation: his skin a little too grey, the veins running away from his neck slightly raised, like a spiderweb of scars. Sid swallowed hard around the lump in his throat.

He hadn’t ever turned someone himself, and it was ironic to think that he was faced with this, turning Geno now, after all that had happened. But he didn’t have a choice. There was no way Geno would make it out of this human.

When the expanse of Geno’s neck was mostly clean, rubbed raw from the scratchy hotel room towel, a bubble of blood was still pooling up at each puncture mark, sluggishly growing and running down toward his collar.

“You need help?” Rusty asked, and when Sid glanced at him he looked a little queasy. “Maybe you should hold the towel to it for a while?”

Sid definitely was not going to do that, but he didn’t really need two of his rookies lingering over his shoulder for what was about to happen. “Can you guys go let Sullivan know what’s going on? I don’t want him to be surprised in the morning.”

“Um—“ Rusty said, “are you sure you don’t—“

“I’ve got it,” Sid said, feeling antsy and a little irritated. They trusted him enough to come to him with this, they needed to just _let him handle it_. “Just tell him Geno got bit and I’m dealing with it. I can catch them all up in the morning.”

Rusty looked like he wanted to protest again, but Olli took him by the elbow and turned for the door. “Good luck,” Olli said, and looked at Sid very seriously for a moment and then shut the door.

Alone in the room, Sid took one long, deep breath, letting the smell of Geno fully into his head and his lungs, settling himself for what he was about to do. He tried not to think about how he had contemplated this before, what it might be like if Geno was—but it certainly hadn’t been like this in his shameful daydreams, Geno so far gone, forced into this by the stupidly sadistic hand of fate.

Sid closed his eyes and leaned forward, licking across the bloody marks to get them to close up, gripping white-knuckled into the bedspread as Geno’s taste filled his mouth. In order for this to work, he’d have to make his own mark—clean and neat, the proper depth. Whoever had made this one had been sloppy and overeager, biting so hard that the blunt edges of their other teeth had made a linear bruise in between the wounds.

The bleeding slowed down to the barest trickle until Sid could barely taste it at all, just the salty aftertaste of Geno’s skin as he licked back and forth.

“Hey,” he said, pulling back and cradling a hand around Geno’s chin, tapping his cheek to rouse him. “Geno, hey—I really need you to listen to me.” Geno hummed a little, his eyelids fluttering, his pulse slow against Sid’s palm. Sid really hoped that he was awake enough to understand.

“I have to bite you again,” Sid told him, running his hand down into the the curve of Geno’s neck, the only place on his body where he was still a little warm. “It’s not gonna feel great.” He ran his own tongue over his fangs, fully extended inside his mouth, sharp enough that his tongue felt the sting. His brain felt like it was clouding over, the bloodlust stronger now, after having a taste.

All vampires had urges, Sid’s sire had told him. Sometimes he liked to think he was above it—the pure animalistic _want_ , but he was only, well—he was only some twisted form of a man.

Right now he didn’t feel very above it at all, but he needed to be level headed for Geno, who didn’t have very much blood left to give.

“Nod for me?” Sid asked, lowering his face to Geno’s neck again, acceptably far enough away from the previous bite, waiting for some sign of Geno’s assent, as if that would make any of this okay. After a moment, he felt Geno’s head nodding against his cupped hand, and he took it as the sign he needed and took another long, centering breath, and said a prayer to a deity he didn’t believe in and sunk his teeth in.

The memories flooded back to him immediately, Geno’s blood thick in his mouth, his body twitching warm in Sid’s lap. He had been younger, then, his hair long enough for Sid to hold onto as he fed. They had been so fucking stupid, Geno had wanted it _so fucking much_. It felt strange to feed from him now with his body so limp, sagging toward Sid’s mouth, his palms fluttering open and closed weakly at his sides.  
Not even the sour taste of adrenaline and guilt now could mask how much Sid liked it, though, and he knew that he could only take so much—one, two three more mouthfuls. When he felt the vibration of Geno’s weak groan against his gums, he knew it was time to stop.

He licked at the wound the same as before, lapping over it with the broad flat of his tongue until the bleeding stopped. Geno’s pulse was still a slow beat against his hand, weak though it was, and when Sid looked at Geno’s face, his eyelids were twitching, small and steady signs of life.

“Just another minute,” he murmured, running his hand down Geno’s cheek and hoping it wouldn’t take much longer. What if this didn’t work, even though Sid had done everything he knew how? What if he’d taken too much?

Everything in his head was swimming in Geno’s blood, a thick syrupy haze he had to push through to think straight. When he lifted his own arm to his mouth and bit down, it felt like no more than a pin prick, nowhere near as bad as being crunched into the boards, or a skate to the face. He made sure to sink his teeth deep, so the blood would flow easily, and when he pulled off, it welled up fast, dripping down his wrist.

Sid brought the arm to Geno’s mouth, propping Geno’s head up with his free hand, the blood smearing haphazardly over his parted lips. “Geno, c’mon,” he said, a little frantic now, needing everything to fall into place. He _needed_ Geno to work with him here; they weren’t going to fail.

“C’mon, G—“ he said again, his voice louder, pressing his arm hard against Geno’s mouth, hoping enough blood would pool in his mouth to trigger his instinct to swallow. “I need you to drink from me.”

It wasn’t until Geno’s lips closed around the wound that he felt himself exhale. The suction was weak, but Sid could feel him trying to swallow, his tongue laving a little across the bite marks. “That’s good,” Sid said, using his free hand to brush the sweaty mess of Geno’s hair from his forehead. “Keep going.”

The longer that Geno drank, the more Sid could feel him rousing, his throat swallowing audibly, his hand coming up to hold Sid’s wrist in place against his mouth. Sid looked across the room and tried to focus very hard on the wall: the ticking clock, the incomprehensible abstract art hung above the TV. Maybe if he didn’t look directly at Geno’s mouth—smeared with _his_ blood—he wouldn’t think about all the times he had never let Geno do this and had desperately wanted to.

Just as he started to feel a bit lightheaded, Geno cracked his eyes open, moaning hoarsely around his next mouthful. Sid pulled his arm away. “That’s enough,” he said, and raised his arm to his own mouth to lick across the bite until it closed. He felt painfully aware of everything, his own half-naked body, his hand still tangled in Geno’s hair, his blood smeared across the full expanse of Geno’s open mouth.

On the bed, Geno was scrunching his face up, opening and closing his eyes and muttering to himself like Sid had rudely awoken him from the hardest sleep of his life. Sid felt himself go lax with relief, resting his face against the side of the mattress. It had worked.

“Sid,” Geno groaned, his voice hoarse. He looked sick—his skin green and grey under his eyes. “Sid, I—“

Sid hoisted him off the bed, settling Geno’s weight across his shoulders until he could drag him into the bathroom, where Geno slumped to the floor like a ragdoll, hands clutching the sides of the toilet.

Geno didn’t have enough hair now to hold back, but Sid lifted the toilet lid for him and settled a cool hand on the back of Geno’s neck as he retched, over and over again until the only thing coming up was air. Probably his stomach wasn’t used to the blood intake just yet.

“Let’s get in the shower,” Sid said. Geno looked filthy, his going out shirt and his skin covered in dried blood, his hair crusted with sweat. Who knew where he had been left before the guys found him.

“Tomorrow,” Geno said, scrunching his nose up and groaning in complaint.

“Wasn’t a question,” Sid said, and got to his feet to step around Geno and turn the tap on, all the way to scalding. “You think you can stand in there on your own?”

But one look at Geno confirmed that he definitely couldn’t—he’d lost a lot of blood, it was the middle of the night. Geno just shook his head back and forth against his folded arms. Okay then.

Sid pulled Geno up to his feet until he could lean against the sink, and Sid’s fingers went to the buttons of his shirt, unbuttoning each one with crisp efficiency. “Help me with your pants,” Sid said, as he pulled Geno’s shirt down his arms. “C’mon.” He turned around to shuck off his own sweats and give Geno a moment of privacy, which was stupid, probably, since it was nothing he hadn’t seen.

Geno’s pants got tangled up on his shoes, and Sid bent to untie them and tried to ignore Geno’s eyes hot on his bare back and bowed head. “Thanks,” Geno said, when Sid helped him step under the spray, his arm held carefully around Geno’s waist. Sid gave him a small, hopefully genuine smile and looked away, focusing on the grout lines in the tile as Geno dunked his head under the water.

“Clean,” Geno said, after a few minutes, and Sid wiped a hand behind Geno’s ear, where some dark blood was still crusted. Geno looked more awake now, looking back at him as he pulled his hand away and shifted them over to wet his own body, rinsing off the sour nervous sweat.

He threw a towel across Geno’s shoulders when they got out, and deposited him on the clean side of the bed and didn’t watch as he dried himself off.

“Feel like shit,” Geno said, once Sid had stripped the duvet off the bed and climbed in, a careful distance away from Geno’s resting body. “Like someone run me over with truck.”

“It feels that way,” Sid said, because he wasn’t going to lie. It would feel like crap for a while, but Geno was strong, and he would get stronger, and get over it. “Get some sleep.”

Sid turned over onto his side, facing the door, his back to Geno who still lay like a corpse, exactly as Sid had laid him out before. It wasn’t often that Sid felt like he needed a full night’s sleep, but for some reason he felt bone tired, maybe more tired than he had ever felt since he was human.

He set an early alarm on his phone and hoped that sleep would claim him soon; he didn’t want to think about Geno’s blood in his mouth, or Geno’s bare hip against his under the hot spray. Tomorrow he would have a lot to answer for, and the next day and the next day, but he could think about it then.

“Thanks, Sid,” Geno said, from where he lay still. Sid closed his eyes tight and let it be the last thing he heard before things went dark.

—

When Sid woke up, Geno was propped up in bed and rubbing his forehead, his skin looking much more grey than green.

“Hey,” Sid said, “how are you feeling?” The wounds on Geno’s neck had faded a little, but not entirely. The one by his jaw was deep enough that it might scar. Sid watched him look aimlessly around the room, unfocused, still mostly asleep.

“Feel like shit,” Geno said, and grumbled a little, and went to hoist himself out of bed, before he realized that he was entirely naked. He looked back at Sid and then down at his lap and then back again.

“Oh, sorry—“ Sid said, feeling his cheeks heat against his will. He stood up and went into the bathroom to retrieve Geno’s pants, and his phone from inside the pocket, and a t-shirt from out of his own duffel bag.

“Your shirt is trashed,” Sid said, handing the pile over, and then heading back to the bathroom to pee and splash water on his face and give Geno a moment of privacy. It felt a little silly to do it, after they’d showered together and after all the years of utter immodesty and after Sid had let him _share blood_ , for god’s sake. `

But Geno’s situation sucked. Sid was responsible now, and determined to make it suck as little as possible, if he could.

Geno was fully dressed when he came back out, sitting up in bed and fiddling with his phone. “Think it’s broken,” he said, mashing futilely at the power button a few times. “What’s happen, last night?”

“I don’t know what happened, like, before you got here. But the guys dragged you in here just about half dead and I--” Sid said, and came to sit beside Geno, and laid a hand on his knee, which was absent of body heat. “I’m just glad it worked,” he said. “You looked—it was pretty bad.”

“I not remember much, but—“ Geno said, and then put his hand back on his face, scrunching it up tight with pain. “Head feel so bad.” He hissed in a breath, shivering in the cool wash of circulated hotel air. “Cold.”

“I might have a sweatshirt in my bag, if you want,” Sid said, rubbing up and down Geno’s leg like the friction would somehow be enough to warm his whole body.

He went to grab it without Geno’s answer; it had been a long time, but he remembered just how much the chills sucked, right after he’d been turned. And he wanted Geno to be taken care of--he was a grown man, but as a vampire he was helpless, new and green and vulnerable.

While Geno was putting the sweatshirt on, Sid grabbed a couple of boxes of blood from his backpack, shaking them gently as he came back to the bed.

“Here,” Sid said, unwrapping the straw on one and piercing it through the hole in the top. “You should drink this.” Geno looked at him skeptically, like he had sprouted three heads. Sid wasn’t sure what the problem was; surely Geno had seen him drink one before.

“You’re not gonna want to drink this on the plane, trust me,” Sid said. “The guys are brutal.”

“Looks like juice,” Geno said, mouth twisted.

“It’s blood, come on,” Sid said. Geno wasn’t going to get his full teeth in for at least another week, and Sid wasn’t about to let him starve in the interim. He would have to get over it.

Geno took the box from him reluctantly, and pursed his lips around the straw, sucking timidly at first, his face screwed up a little like a child forced to eat his peas. Sid looked the other way, out the window to where a construction crane was swinging around an onlooking high rise, the rain pattering down over the crew’s fluorescent coats.

The slurping sound of Geno drinking was louder now, like he had stopped being petulant. He didn’t like having to be told what to do, but he was going to have to deal with it.

“You good?” Sid asked, when Geno sucked the last of the blood from the box. His face was starting to look more pink, the healthy post-feeding flush. Sid was optimistic that this would all work out okay, as long as Geno cooperated. They could treat it just like any other injury; it was a thing they could manage.

“Thanks, Sid,” Geno said to the empty box in his lap, and then turned his gaze to look Sid in the eye. Sid held his gaze for an extended moment, trying not to look nervous or uncertain. He wanted to appear in control—the calm, helping hand of a friend who would get Geno through this setback and back to real life. Inside, he felt his organs roiling around, Geno’s blood that was still inside him rising up to color his cheeks. He didn’t want to think too loudly about liking it.

“Any time,” Sid said, and took a breath and patted Geno twice on the leg and rose from the bed.

—

“You sure you’re okay by yourself?” Sid asked as they boarded the plane, looking back to Geno as he threw his backpack in the overhead bin. Geno had Sid’s hoodie up to obscure the sleepy mat of his hair, plane pillow already looped around his neck. He looked like he was waist deep in a case of the flu, which was probably a convenient excuse if any of the guys asked.

“I’m fine,” Geno said. “Sleep whole time, I’m warm, if get sick I puke on Tanger and it’s fine.” Sid didn’t think it would be fine, exactly, but.

“I’m sure I could ask Flower to move,” Sid said. He didn’t want to be too overbearing, but he knew that Geno would pretend he was fine until he very much wasn’t. Sid didn’t need to start this off by dealing with a four-alarm mid-air crisis. “He sees me everyday; he won’t miss my face.”

“No,” Geno said, and shouldered his way around Sid in the aisle. “Don’t ask Flower, I do then we have bad luck whole playoffs and what you say? Oh Geno, all your fault, mess up routine.” He coughed messily and Sid grimaced; it sounded pretty bad. “No thanks; I’m survive.”

“Tell me if you need anything,” Sid said, eyeing Geno uncertainly as he dropped down into his seat. “I’m not kidding.”

“See you Pittsburgh, Sid,” Geno said. Most of the rest of the team was boarding by now, shuffling noisily through the aisles, and Sid would have to let it drop, unless he wanted to answer a million questions.

When Olli walked by, he caught Sid’s eye for a moment and then looked over at Geno slumped back in his usual seat.. “Under control,” Sid said, and smiled a tight smile. “Thanks.” Olli nodded and walked on by.

Flower was looking at him weirdly when Sid turned back around in his seat, like maybe he wanted to ask, but Sid pulled his eye mask over his eyes and settled into his pillow to shut him down. The news would get out eventually, and he would probably let Flower know before that, but for now he wanted to keep it quiet.

He couldn’t help but feel responsible for helping Geno get through this. All the time he heard stories of vampires turned and set loose without a care, their sires off in the wind, going about the months and years as if they hadn’t just altered the course of a human’s life irreparably. Sid had felt decidedly uneasy about it when Geno had asked Sid to turn him all those years ago. He felt infinitely more guilty now, when there had been no choice.

—

Sullivan stopped Sid as he was de-planing, putting a hand on his shoulder to pull him off to the side of the stairs.

“You wanna tell me what happened?” Sullivan asked. He spoke quietly, which Sid was thankful for. He wasn’t quite ready for word to spread.

“I had to um,” Sid said, stuffing his hands into his coat pockets, “He got in a pretty bad situation—turning him was the only option.” Sullivan’s eyebrows raised up, surprised somehow, even though he knew what Sid was. It wasn’t a secret, but Sid knew it probably seemed like a big deal. Well, it probably _was_ a big deal.

“So he’s a vampire now?” Sullivan asked, leaning in a little closer. “And he’ll be alright?”

“He will be,” Sid assured him, and pretended like he wasn’t assuring himself. “I’ll make sure.”

“Let me know if you need anything from us,” Sullivan said, and clapped Sid on the shoulder again.

“Of course,” Sid said. He looked behind him, to where the rest of the team was still spilling out onto the tarmac. Geno was supposed to be meeting him, but he wasn’t lingering around anywhere that Sid could see, not by the foot of the stairs or over under the terminal door. “Excuse me,” Sid said, “I have to—“

Sullivan released him, and he scanned the lot, but Geno was nowhere to be seen. He walked back up the stairs to the plane and peeked his head in, and found him leaning against one of the seat backs, bundled up still, his backpack in a heap at his feet and his head in his hands.

“What the fuck, Geno,” Sid said, feeling a hot rush of adrenaline as he scampered forward to support Geno’s slumping weight, wrapping an arm around his middle like he had the night before, Geno’s body sagging into him, heavy and cold. “I told you to say something if you needed me.”

“Not know until you off plane,” Geno said, groaning a little, the words muffled into his hands. “Sleep mostly, but I get up and.” He groaned again, and pulled his hands away from his face to gesture in waves around his head. Dizzy, Sid guessed; he probably needed to eat.

“C’mon, bud,” Sid said, and picked up Geno’s backpack. “You got everything? You good to walk?” He would probably help Geno down the stairs if he needed to, or do anything that he asked, and he was trying not to feel weird about it. It was his job now, just like helping the rookies acclimate to the room, or making sure that everyone knew which sandwich place was the best.

Geno nodded, and shook him off.

“Need anything from your car?” Sid asked, as they walked slowly to the lot, Sid with both their bags slung over his shoulders, Geno shuffling quietly behind him, burrowed up inside his sweatshirt and coat like it was still winter. Geno shook his head.

In the car, Geno hunched down into his seat, and Sid turned the heating on full blast, angling the vents in Geno’s direction.

“Always this cold?” Geno asked, pulling his arms around himself and twisting his mouth in displeasure.

“It goes away,” Sid said, and looked over his shoulder and put the car in reverse. “You get used to it more or less.”

Geno mumbled a little, gruff and undecipherable, and turned his face toward the window and stayed silent for the rest of the drive.

“I just need to run in for a second,” Sid said, as they turned onto his street and pulled up to idle near the gate. “I’m gonna grab a few things, it’s probably easier if I hang around at your place for a while.”

“You need stay?” Geno asked, voice still groggy. “It’s that bad?”

“Just for a few days, okay?” Sid assured him. It wasn’t likely that he would need to be strictly monitored for any longer than that, unless something went terribly awry. Sid hoped it wouldn’t.

Inside, Sid rifled through the front closet for a bag and wandered around the house gathering up necessities: more blood, a change of clothes, the heated blanket draped over his couch. It would probably be more practical to have Geno stay here, propped up on Sid’s couch with everything he needed in easy reach, but he knew that Geno would probably be less surly if he was surrounded by the creature comforts of home.

Geno had his eyes closed when Sid got back to the car, and he didn’t rouse at all when Sid tossed the bag in the back seat, or when he started the engine and pulled back out onto the main road. During the winding drive up to Geno’s house, Sid snuck a few sideways glances at him, his face pale and peaceful, the mark Sid had left on his neck faded to nearly nothing. Geno looked younger in sleep, like the man Sid had—well—loved.

Hopefully, he wouldn’t have to stay at Geno’s for long. All of his old, dusty feelings would only complicate things, and he knew how easy it would be to fall into their old, worn habits if they weren’t careful, cooped up together, sharing the strange intimacies of the undead. Sid’s view hadn’t changed: he hadn’t thought that Geno was ready then, and he still didn’t. But it had happened, and now they would both get through it, for better or for worse.

When he pulled in and shut off the car, he reached over to shake Geno’s shoulder. “We’re home,” he said, jostling him until he awoke. Geno blinked sleepily and rubbed at his face with an open palm. Sid busied himself with unloading their bags from the car so he wouldn’t have to look at Geno and feel a single thing.

“You want the couch or upstairs?” Sid asked, dropping their bags down in the foyer.

“Couch,” Geno said, scrubbing a hand through his hair, still mostly asleep. “Hungry, though.” He started to amble toward the kitchen, and Sid grabbed his arm, turning him back in the direction of the living room.

“Go,” Sid said, “I’ll bring you something, just give me a few minutes.”

“Not baby,” Geno said, and then devolved into some unintelligible grumbling that sounded distinctly unkind as he walked off.

Sid recalled the first weeks of turning as being almost like puberty. Your body did weird things you didn’t ask it to do, you felt uncomfortable, your emotions went up and down like a rough, choppy wave. Sid was prepared for Geno to say plenty of unkind things to him for the next good while.

The fridge was filled with an assortment of random things—yogurts and stacks of prepared meals, clamshells full of fruit. Geno wouldn’t really need any of it, now, at least not for nutrition’s sake, so Sid rearranged things until most of it was pushed to one side, and filled a whole shelf with the blood boxes and some of the blood packs he liked and called it good.

He brought one of the boxes out to Geno, along with the heated blanket from his bag. Geno was stretched out with his feet on the coffee table, his socks saggy and hanging off of his feet, his face sallow and pitiful, flipping through channels on the TV.

“Take so long,” Geno said, and flipped quicker until he settled on some channel playing soccer.

“You lived,” Sid said, and plopped down right next to Geno on the couch, sinking deep into the cushion. Geno looked over and laughed at him a little.

“What is wrong with your couch?” Sid asked. There was literally no way this was comfortable. Had Geno even replaced this thing since he moved in? Sid felt suspiciously like the answer was no.

“Perfect couch,” Geno said, and bounced up and down a few times weakly. “Nothing is wrong.”

“Whatever you say,” Sid said, and laughed at Geno’s antics--one of the things he missed most--and transferred the blanket from his arm to Geno’s lap. “Switch is on the bottom, it gets hot if you want.”

Geno unfolded it slowly, spreading it out across his legs and lap, trying without success to get it to cover his feet. “Too small,” he complained, but he flipped it on to warm and tucked his arms inside it nonetheless.

They sat in silence for a while, just watching the match. Sid wasn’t a huge fan of soccer and couldn’t follow which teams were playing, or the play-by-play which was entirely in Russian. Instead he just watched Geno’s reactions, one eye on him as he scrunched his face up and tucked his lips inside his mouth and generally did a number of weird things with his face.

“Drink this,” Sid said, picking up the blood box and stabbing the straw through the foil slot and holding it out for Geno to take. Geno turned his head to look, but instead of extracting his arm to take hold of it, he just opened his mouth.

Sid just looked at him for an extended moment, but Geno just continued to sit there, mouth hung open.

Sid shook his head a little, and then bent the straw and guided it into Geno’s mouth, trying to look past his shoulder instead of at his lips pursed around it. As he drank, Sid could feel the rush of the blood pulling up through the straw, the noisy slurping, and he gritted his teeth, clenching them tight in hopes that his own fangs wouldn’t drop. He was hungry, sure, but he could eat when Geno fell asleep, and he didn’t need to be thinking about it while Geno was sitting here feeding, not about the blood sloshing around in Geno’s mouth, or Sid’s own blood all over his chin the night before.

He resolved that Geno would need to get used to doing this himself. Helping him acclimate was one thing, but his hands weren’t broken. He could feed himself.

“Only this flavor?” Geno asked, letting the straw drop from his mouth. Sid tore his gaze away from where he had been contemplating the design of Geno’s drapes and looked at his scrunched-up face, a few drops of blood still clinging temptingly to the corner of his lip.

Geno was really going to be the death of him, the second death.

“You want to starve?” Sid asked, dropping the empty box on the table and not watching as Geno’s tongue swiped out to clean up his mess. Sure, the synthetic stuff wasn’t _great_ , but it was palatable and full of nutrients. There was no way that Geno hadn’t eaten something worse in the name of hockey.

“Maybe you give me yours again,” Geno said, and burrowed down further into the blanket and turned to look back at the TV. “It’s better.”

Sid swallowed, and felt his fangs poking out traitorously. He wasn’t going to think at _all_ about Geno feeding from him; that way led madness, and Geno didn’t even have his teeth yet and the whole idea deserved to be squashed immediately.

“We’ll talk,” Sid said, because he didn’t want to fight about it, and Geno needed some rest. “For now, you drink that.” He rose from the couch, gathering up the discarded box and patting Geno’s blanket-covered leg. “Get some sleep, okay?”

“Fine,” Geno said, grumbling a little, but he shifted his legs up to spread across the length of the couch, tucking his feet into the space between the cushions. He looked pretty pitiful, but Sid knew that he probably felt like shit, and some rest would do him some good, give his body time to move through the motions of transformation without also trying to function awake and alert in the human world.

It was strange to look at him like this, the same way he had looked at him a thousand times before, his hair sticking up wildly under the heated blanket, his socked feet hanging off the couch arm. The familiar sight of it made Sid feel uncomfortably soft inside his skin.

“G’night,” he said to Geno and his couch cocoon, and then he scanned the room for anything else he might need before morning, and went over to shut off the light.

—

The next morning, he brought Geno along for morning skate and parked him in Dr. Vyas’ office for testing while he went out to the ice. The workouts were shorter this far into the spring, and this was probably the only skate Sid would participate in this week, a quick refreshment for his brain and his legs, a reset after the events of the past thirty-six hours.

Dr. Vyas had an assistant now who was a vampire, and she was the only one in the office with Geno when Sid came back down, bent over his arm trying to draw blood. Sid lingered in the doorway until Geno spotted him and grimaced, making an exaggerated face of pain.

“Don’t be a baby,” Sid said, and came in and pulled a rolling chair over next to the exam table. “I know you’ve had worse.”

“Takes too long,” Geno complained. “Blood too slow.” The blood flow was pretty slow, dripping sluggishly into the tube. Sid wasn’t sure what the science was behind it, really, but he knew that part of the transformation was just getting all of the blood replaced, and probably it would flow lightly until that point. Geno had sucked down two full boxes of blood in the car this morning, and he would probably need another one soon. It felt not unlike managing the feeding schedule of an infant.

“Just a couple minutes left,” Dr. McLane said, checking the levels. While they waited, she ran Sid through Geno’s tests, flipping through the endless paperwork, vitamin levels, prescription plan, the works. Most of it seemed fairly routine.

“How is his trajectory looking?” Sid asked. They had a game tonight, and he would have to fly to Philly in a few days.

“Hard to say,” she said, shrugging a shoulder and flipping back to the front of the chart. “It’s not as simple as a set timeline. Every new vampire is different. He might need a few days, but he also might need a few months.”

Sid really hoped that it wasn’t a few months. Both because that would be awful for Geno, and because he needed Geno to be better before that, in time to suit up for playoffs.

“I’ll make sure he bounces back,” Sid said, looking over at where Geno was fiddling with the hem of his shorts, spacing out on the frayed edge. He watched Geno’s blood dripping again for a second, red and thin, and tried not to think about how sweet it probably smelled or how much he wanted to taste it again. It was selfish thing to want—in the heat of transformation it had been one thing, necessary, life-saving, but Geno hadn’t given him permission now, and Sid didn’t want to just—

Well, really he did want to. That was the whole problem.

“I think you’re all done here,” Dr. McLane said, inspecting the collection tube and unhooking everything from Geno’s arm. “I’ll run some more tests on this tonight, but for now please make sure you pick up all of your vitamins, and get a lot of rest.”

“Definitely rest,” Geno said, and yawned dramatically and smirked at Dr. McLane after like he liked to do, and climbed off the table to head for the door.

“Thanks,” Sid said, turning back to wave at her as he followed Geno out. “I’ll keep you in the loop.” She looked up from her computer for a second, her face creased with amused sympathy, and waved in return.

—

The day the team was scheduled to fly to Philly, Geno didn’t come downstairs for breakfast. Sid didn’t think anything of it at first, and he drank his mug of blood and flipped through his email and went downstairs to ride the bike in Geno’s home gym, but by the time he padded back up the carpeted stairs, it was well past ten and Geno was still nowhere to be found.

Maybe he was just sleeping, Sid thought, even though Geno had been an early riser all week, waking up ungodly early to suck grumpily at a couple of blood boxes and scroll blearily through his phone. But when Sid got to the second floor, Geno’s bedroom was empty and the bathroom light was on, spilling out the open door and into the hall.

“Everything okay?” Sid asked, peeking around the door. Geno was inside bent over the double marble sinks, face pressed close to the glass, squinting frustratedly at his now nearly invisible reflection, a couple of fingers stuffed in his open mouth.

Geno didn’t look over at him, just kept prodding, face twisted in pain. Sid stepped into the room and shuffled over to lean against the wet edge of the counter, and Geno pulled his fingers out, still shiny from spit, and dropped them at his side.

“Sore,” he complained, grimacing with his teeth bared. Sid could see a hint of white peeking out above his human canines, above the usual line of his gums: the first sighting of his new teeth.

“Do you mind if I—“ Sid asked, and raised his own hand to Geno’s mouth without thinking, thumbing his upper lip out of the way to inspect. The teeth looked like they were coming in okay, but they were small and a little red around the edges, no doubt sore from crowding in front of Geno’s usual teeth.

In front of him, Geno stood very still, almost like a statue, barely breathing against Sid’s hand, his gaze turned to the side like he didn’t want to watch. Sid suddenly felt very aware of how close they were, Geno’s hand centimeters from Sid’s hip, Geno’s bare stomach sucked in and clenched like he was trying hard not to move.

“It’s just teething,” Sid said, prodding lightly until Geno hissed and pulled away. “Sorry. Do you have some Orajel or something? That will probably help.”

Geno looked at him uncertainly, and raised his hands in a shrug. “Not, uh—“

“Oh, sorry,” Sid apologized. He forgot that Geno didn’t always know the names for things, still. “You know, like—something to numb your mouth, for the pain.” He rubbed a finger over his own gum line, goofily mimicking spreading the gel across his teeth.

“Oh,” Geno said, “yes, okay.” And he went around the corner to rummage through a cabinet and came back with a few half empty tubes of some sort of gel that Sid couldn’t read but had a drawing of a creepy cartoon smile on the front. Well, it would have to do.

“Sit,” Sid said, patting the counter and encouraging Geno to come and lean against it, hunched down a little so he was within Sid’s reach. Geno sat down reluctantly and spread his legs open and Sid stepped between them, squirting a generous dollop of gel onto one of his fingers and holding Geno’s jaw in his hand with the other.

“Open your mouth for me—” Sid said, and paused with his finger hovering in front of Geno’s lips. Probably Geno could do this himself, but--well--it was nice thing to do, and he wanted to help. There was no harm in that. “Warning that this might be a little cold.”

Geno bared his teeth, his eyes closed, and Sid tried to concentrate on his mouth as he stuck his finger back in, rubbing it along the highest part of Geno’s gums and then lower, sliding through saliva, the gel tingling a little against his finger. When he went to rub at the lowest part, down where the teeth were exposed, his finger caught against the edge of one of them, the sharp point slicing painfully across the pad.

He could smell the blood immediately, and he could see that Geno did too, Geno’s eyes popping open to look directly at him.

“Sorry,” Sid said, and wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for, but when he tried to pull his finger away, Geno’s hand came up to encircle his wrist and hold him in place, his lips closing around Sid’s knuckle, the finger still bleeding and trapped in the wet heat of Geno’s mouth.

Sid wasn’t sure what to do. His body felt frozen, aware of how close they were, the lack of body heat, the dull pull of blood from his finger as Geno sucked on it. He wouldn’t stop looking Sid directly in the eye.

“Um,” Sid said, and Geno wasn’t releasing him. He knew that he should probably pull away, but there was no way he could, selfishly stuck here between Geno’s thighs as Geno fed from him.

After what felt like eternity, Geno dropped his gaze and his grip on Sid’s arm, licking across Sid’s finger once more before relinquishing it from the suction of his mouth. Sid let his hand fall to the counter, and looked down at it, the cut small and pink, not bleeding at all. It was cold and wet all the way to the knuckle.

“Sorry,” Geno said sheepishly, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “I’m uh—hungry. And you taste—“

Sid couldn’t stand here and listen to it, Geno talking about how good Sid tasted to him, and of course he did, he was the first and only person Geno had ever tasted. Sid had tasted a lot of people in the last hundred years, and maybe none of them had tasted as good as Geno had, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it and he didn’t want to have to.

This certainly wouldn’t help him forget.

“I need to get going,” Sid said, and stepped away and turned for the door, feeling awkward and rude and not sparing a single glance back at Geno still splayed wide-legged on the counter in his soft sweatpants with his bare skin all over the place and his face open and awake, hunger satiated by Sid’s blood.

—

The time apart would do them some good, Sid thought, as he reclined his seat on the plane. After a few days, it would be easy to laugh off his reaction. Things had been going decently well, so far. So what if Sid got weird about a little blood-sharing? Geno was newly turned; things happened. It didn’t have to mean anything deeper than that.  
Geno seemed frustrated with the changes he was enduring, sulking around at home in his sweatpants, grumpily dipping his finger into Sid’s bloody pre-game shakes. He hadn’t asked much of Sid, but maybe he needed something he wasn’t getting. His emotions were a little all over the place: he would smile sweetly when Sid heated up his morning mug of blood or let him pick the TV channel, but he complained about being sore all the time and bored from not playing, and sometimes he would just huff a lot and barricade himself in his study and shut out the whole world.

Sid resolved that he would bring it up when he got back to town, but they flew out late after the game was over and all Sid could do was let himself into Geno’s house at some ungodly hour of the morning and pass out fully dressed on the couch. When he woke up, he barely had time to heat up his breakfast and change into his sweats, and Geno hadn’t come downstairs by the time he walked out the door.

At lunch, he came back, and Geno was sitting in the living room, watching a Russian movie on his laptop, laughing awkwardly with a bag of ice pressed to his cheek. Sid watched him for a long moment and felt a little weird about barging in, after he had high-tailed it out of Geno’s bathroom so abruptly the other day. But maybe if he just acted normal, everything would be fine.

“Sore?” Sid asked, sitting down in the chair to Geno’s right, pulling the handle back to recline the footrest and propping up his feet that were still feeling fatigued from the game the night before. “Need any help?”

Geno tapped a few keys on his laptop and the sound of the movie cut off. “Teeth,” he said, lowering the ice bag to speak. “Can’t wait for new ones come in whole way, hate it.”

“Yeah, it sucks,” Sid said. He couldn’t remember a lot about his teeth coming in, but he’d become plenty familiar with the dentist this past decade, and the irritation of getting his caps put on was forever solidified in his mind. One of his fangs was fake, now, and always felt a little weird when he retracted it after he fed. “Listen,” he said, turning his body to face Geno full on, “can we talk about something?”

Geno looked at him for a moment, and Sid thought that maybe he would avoid it and go back to watching, but he agreed. “Okay, yes,” he said, setting his laptop aside, the ice bag still dripping in his hand.

Sid took a deep breath, settling himself. “I just wanted to check in, you know—I’ve been trying to uh—help as much as I can but, if there’s anything I’m missing, just—”

“Sid,” Geno said, and leaned forward to set the ice on the table and readjust the blanket draped around his shoulders. “No. It’s too much.”

“C’mon,“ Sid said. Too much? “If I’m messing this up, okay. Feel free to like—give me pointers, a list, I don’t know. I’m just trying to help.”

“It’s too much,” Geno repeated, shaking his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s weird. I go out after game, suddenly I’m vampire, wake up with you, every day you here in my home, you know? It’s lot, like—I never think it’s happen, and now—”

Weird was definitely the right word. Sid hadn’t turned him that summer, when Geno asked, and he had gone home sour and heartbroken and thought that maybe they’d never have to talk about it ever again. But here they were, thrust into some odd mirror-universe timeline, by the bizarre hand of fate.

“You help me lot, you know,” Geno continued. “But maybe you go home. I’m okay. Soon I’m back and you see me at rink and help me, but like, on ice.”

Sid felt a little thwarted. He’d begun to settle into the idea of it—staying with Geno for a bit, lazily watching TV together, Geno reading the newspaper headlines over his shoulder in the morning while Sid drank his shake and Geno drank his blood boxes with a half-hearted frown. He thought they could probably do it just fine, as friends, if they tried hard enough.

“If that’s what you want,” Sid said. If Geno was unhappy with the arrangement, Sid wouldn’t fight. “I really don’t think you’re gonna need much help on the ice, though.” Sid’s ability to play had definitely suffered a bit when he was turned, from the exhaustion and the headaches and the pain, but he hadn’t had access to the round-the-clock medical staff that Geno had here, or someone to tell him what vitamins to take, or really any luxury at all.

“I’m not know what to expect,” Geno said, and shrugged. “It’s still little bit scary, not know when I can play, when I stop be so hungry, not be so sore. Maybe I go out on ice and want to eat some guy, you know?”

“I don’t think you’re going to eat anyone,” Sid said, laughing a little. There had certainly been a period of adjustment for Sid, to all the blood he encountered during a given game, but he hadn’t ever really felt the urge to do anything quite that drastic. “Have you ever seen me lose my cool like that?”

“Maybe,” Geno replied, and then smirked a little, small and pained with his sore mouth, and it took Sid a moment to remember.

Geno had gotten a guy’s elbow straight to the face, so many years ago now that Sid had nearly forgotten. He’d dropped to his knees and Sid had been able to smell his blood the second it had hit the ice in thick red drops. It had taken all of Sid’s composure to not skate over and shove the trainers and referees aside, and in the end he hadn’t been able to resist entirely, putting Geno’s face in the clutch of his glove during intermission and leaning up to sink his teeth into Geno’s bloody lower lip.

The memory of it flowed through him, bright and clear like it was yesterday, and he folded his legs up in his seat, digging his nails into his ankle to try to prevent his teeth from dropping thinking about Geno’s blood and the way he’d slumped in Sid’s grip and the way he’d moaned so sweetly after the game when Sid had pinned him against the shower wall and bitten the back of his neck.

“Anyway,” Sid said, clearing his throat. “Thanks for being honest with me.” He was trying to focus on the here and now, where Geno was pitifully swollen from his teeth growing in and had a brown smear of dried blood on the collar of his shirt. “It’s probably good for us to set up some parameters for this.”

“Okay,” Geno said, “I like to have you help, like I say, but—don’t need you look over me every second, you know? Hard for me, but like—more hard if I have to remember.”

It was the first that Sid had ever heard him mention it, that he too was thinking about the way it used to be, or Sid turning him down. Any of it. Geno had been avoidant and terrible in the aftermath of their breakup, and Sid had always figured that he had grown seeds of resentment for Sid, for all the things Sid wasn’t willing to give to him. But he’d never brought it up, and it was almost jarring to hear it now, a thing that had since only existed in Sid’s absentminded daydreams.

“Well I can definitely, uh—I can definitely sleep at home,” Sid said. It wasn’t as if it was a terrible hardship. He liked his house, and his own bed. “But I can come hang out sometimes, if you want.” He tried not to analyze too deeply why he wanted to, or how spending these few days together had made him think about how much he really _missed_ Geno’s company taking up his free time. It had been a long time since they’d spent afternoons tucked up in Sid’s attic room, Sid’s teeth sunk into Geno’s neck while they watched TV.

Geno smiled a little, as much as he could with his mouth reconfiguring itself, and put the laptop on the table like an offering, turning the movie he’d been watching back on, the screen turned so Sid could follow along.

After a while of trying to watch and mostly failing to keep focused, Sid turned his head to look at Geno, slumped against the arm of the couch, his head resting in his hand. “Can I ask how it happened?” he asked.

“Hmm?” Geno craned his head back to look at him. “You mean this?” He prodded his fingers along the line of his neck, just below his jaw where Sid knew he still had a scar.

“Yeah,” Sid said. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I—“

“I’m stupid,” Geno said, scrunching his face up a little in distaste. “There’s guy in bar, in New York. He’s speak Russian, and it’s nice, talk long time and know I’m clever, talk serious, whatever. But I know he’s want, he touch my neck, and we go in restroom, and—“ He watched the screen again for a minute, and Sid watched the blue glow flit across his face. “I think maybe he only take a little, but his bite hurts, and he takes—he takes a lot. I’m stupid.”

“It was pretty stupid,” Sid said. He wanted to be able to reassure Geno that it wasn’t, that he was only the victim of terrible circumstance, but he’d always been reckless with this, and Sid didn’t feel glad that it had come back to bite him in the end, but. “I don’t mean, well—“

“It’s happen,” Geno said, sounding like it was a lot more complicated than that. “And you help me, you know?”

“Yeah,” Sid said. “Yeah, of course.”

—

Geno was slated to come back to the rink the following week, to begin light workouts with Andy under Dr. McLane’s exacting gaze. Sid gathered the whole team up in the locker room the morning of and stood with his back to the latched door.

“A couple of you already know about this,” he said, scanning the room, “but Geno got bitten by a vampire in New York.” The young guys immediately started buzzing, muttering amongst themselves. Vampires had only been allowed in the league since after the 2005 lockout, and Sid knew that there were probably still guys on the team who felt uneasy about it, no matter what they said to his face.

“Is he dead?” someone asked.

“Is he gonna be back in time for playoffs?”

“He’s fine,” Sid said, voice raised over the hubbub. “He’s at the rink today, which is why I wanted to let you guys know. I think the team is planning an official release on it soon, but for now, let’s keep it within the room.”

Everyone started chattering again, murmuring affirmatively. “Try not to give him too much hassle,” Sid said, even though he knew the way of team camaraderie and was sure that someone would. “He’s still adjusting.”

Someone knocked on the other side of the door then, a solid steady rap. It was probably Sullivan, which was just as well. “Thanks, guys,” Sid said, and waved at the room in recognition, before he opened the door. “See you out on the ice.”

On his way out, he went around the corner to the training area, and peeked in to the medical office, where Dr. McLane was hunched over the computer with Dr. Vyas.

“He here yet?” Sid asked. He’d spent the night in his own house the night before, for the first time in a week, and woke up to a text message from Geno: **need new flavor (((** along with a blurry picture of his empty blood box.

“Running on Geno time,” Dr. Vyas said, not looking up from his work. “He’ll get here when he gets here, Sidney.”

Sid wandered off toward the rink, feeling summarily chided, and directed his focus to practice, which had begun to feel mostly routine and mundane. Playoffs started in a few short weeks, and he was ready—ready for the pace the team was clicking at to pay off, ready to start the real work. With Geno out, Bones had slotted in between Hags and Phil, the team rearranged to pick up the slack.

Toward the end of practice, Flower slapped him on the legs as he swung through the crease. “How is fatherhood?” he shouted, and Sid slid to a stop, leaning on the corner of the cage. Across the rink, some of the remaining guys were shooting on Murray, but no one could hear.

“It’s true, right?” Flower asked, smiling up at him, in that way that always looked like a smirk. “You’re the one who turned him?”

“That doesn’t make me—“ Sid protested, feeling his cheeks flush up, as much as they still could.

“Oh, I think it does, my friend,” Flower said. “Good luck with that, eh?” He tapped Sid on the pads again, and then as Sid was skating away, said, “Call me if you need a babysitter.”

The team was insufferable, Flower especially, who had been pushing Sid’s buttons for over a decade now. It had been hard, when he first started playing, to get control of the room—he was older than every single guy on the team, but he would look young forever, and not everyone had been too keen on taking their commands from a member of the undead.

Flower had been kind to him. His girlfriend was a vampire, and beautiful and whip-smart. Sid had spent a considerable amount of time holed up in their kitchen, eating weird inventive blood-based recipes from Vero’s blender while Flower threw balled-up tin foil at them from the table.

He had never really understood it, the idea that you could take a human as your partner, once you were a member of the undead. Wouldn’t it be awful to watch them grow older? And maybe they would slowly grow to resent you, and all the things you couldn’t provide. Sid was happy to spend time with humans—they were sweet and yielding and passionate, full of life—but spending a whole lifetime with one had always seemed like setting yourself up for remorse, no matter how much you cared.

Flower had always seemed perfectly content, in a way that Geno never had, to remain human. And maybe Sid just didn’t know, maybe their arguments were much the same, maybe he wanted to turn, and he and Veronique stayed together anyway, for whatever reason.

Sid tried not to wonder what it would have been like, if he’d stayed with Geno all these years, if Geno would have grown to resent him for keeping him human, despite his requests otherwise. But Geno had seemed to resent him anyway, for ending it, so what? He couldn’t have won.

He tried to put it out of his mind as he stripped his gear off and went in search of Geno, who was running on the treadmill in the weight room, hooked up to a bunch of monitors and talking to Andy at his side.

Sid leaned in the doorway for a long moment, watching him, his cheeks still pink from breakfast, his skin otherwise sallow and pale, his hair a little long around his ears. Maybe they could make something new now, a repaired friendship, strengthened by their shared blood.

“How is he testing?” Sid asked, walking up to them and leaning over Andy’s clipboard, taking his hat off for a moment to readjust his sweat-soaked hair.

“Muscle function is going okay,” Andy said.

“Knee feels like new,” Geno said, as the program on the treadmill slowed down to a crawl. “Magic vampire strength, it’s good. I play soon.”

“We’ll see,” Andy said, laughing. “I’ll defer to the doctor on that.” He put a hand on the machine to reset the program, and began unhooking the wires from one of Geno’s arms. “Can you grab the ones on the other side for me, Sid?”

Sid went around to help, and held Geno’s wrist in his hand as he pulled the sticky pads from his skin. When he was done, he looked up to find Geno looking down at him, his expression as opaque as mud.

“You good to finish cooling down on your own?” Andy asked, bundling the cords around his arm, looking over to where a couple of guys were gathered around the hurdles, awaiting his instruction.

“I’m fine,” Geno said, and looked down at Sid again and smirked, his new teeth glinting a little longer now inside his mouth. “Sid is help.”

“I guess I did say I would, eh?” Sid said, and he smiled and stayed for a while, lying around on the mats on the floor, dutifully pulling on Geno’s arms.

—

A few nights later, Sid dreamed about turning him again, but this time Geno was young, fresh off the Stanley Cup win, long and gangly in Sid’s lap. Sid dreamed that they were wet from the pool and he held Geno’s hair out of the way and just went for it, sucking and sucking, tongue sliding against Geno’s skin, Geno’s dick hard in his lap.

In the dream, Geno moaned loud and obnoxiously when Sid’s teeth dug in, and Sid lay back and let Geno feast on him, after, holding Geno’s sweaty head in his hands, blood getting everywhere, smeared in long splotches all over the bed.

He woke up in the morning with his dick hard and tenting his shorts, blinking his eyes open against the dry, recycled air. By the time he made it to the rink, he was still thinking about it, and trying not to, and when Geno came up behind him in the lounge and put a cold hand on his shoulder he tensed.

“Morning, Sid,” Geno said, his hand not moving from where it lay.

“Morning,” Sid said, and popped open the lid of his thermos and took a long sip of blood as Geno dropped into the chair next to him. “You want some?”

Geno took the thermos from him and drank, his head tilted back, draining the rest of it until it dribbled out around the corners of his lips.

“You’re a mess,” Sid said, and watched as Geno just smiled back at him and wiped a hand across his mouth, proud of himself for his sloppy indulgence. God, Sid needed to get out onto the ice.

“I practice soon, I think,” Geno said. “Day after next Philly game, maybe.”

“They cleared you?” Sid asked. He’d only been keeping cursory tabs, checking in with Dr. McLane when he saw her in the hall. Geno had been progressing well, the swelling in his mouth had gone down, he’d been marginally less surly.

He’d sent Sid a photo the day previous of some weird tomato soup concoction he’d made with the blood Sid left in his fridge. **soup good ))))** it had said, followed by a string of emojis: a thumbs-up, a bat, a tongue. **you come over soon. eat leftover.** Sid hadn’t taken him up on it yet.

“Dr. McLane say maybe,” Geno said, picking at a stack of napkins near his arm, peeling strips off the top. “If I control myself.”

“You really think you can’t?” Sid asked. It wasn’t always easy, sure, but Geno could follow his example.

“I think it’s,” Geno started, and looked around at the guys in the room, a few of them milling about by the breakfast buffet, out of earshot. “I’m think more lately, have dream like—I bite someone, drink from them. Dana has cut on his hand other day and I zone out like—just keep thinking about.”

“Oh,” Sid said, “Are you sure you’re eating enough?” Sometimes when he didn’t get enough synthetic, or missed a dose of vitamins, the urge to feed got more intense, people on the street smelled sharper, and sweeter, walking around with his head in a distracted, red fog.

“I eat,” Geno said, “Lots, like—I eat too much, but still people smell so good and I—“ He was quiet for a second, rearranging the scraps of napkin on the table, fiddling with his hands. When he spoke again, he leaned in close to Sid, so close that Sid could smell him, and lowered his voice and said, “Doctor says it help, maybe, if I feed before. Then it’s like—I don’t think about so much.”

“Uh, huh,” Sid said, because it did make sense. “Well, if you want me to help you find someone, I can probably—“ Maybe Flower would be up for it, if Sid got Vero’s permission. Maybe Kuni would take one for the team.

“No, It’s fine,” Geno said, “Don’t bother guys.” He was shredding the napkin into infinitely more tiny pieces. “Maybe I see if some other way, you know? Maybe special food I make or something.”

“Well, suit yourself,” Sid said. “It might be good to try some animal blood, if that’s the route you’re going. Synthetic isn’t going to do you much good.”

“You have?” Geno asked, turning a curious eye on him.

“What? Animal blood?” Sid asked, and grabbed his empty thermos and stood up from his seat, because practice was starting soon. “I mean, I probably have something? Steak maybe. Some liver?”

“Come for dinner,” Geno said, putting a hand on Sid’s arm to stop him as he headed for the door. “You can bring.”

—

Sid took Geno up on dinner a couple of nights later. He left the house as the sun was setting, driving up the winding hills to Geno’s house with one of the steaks from the back of his freezer thawing in a lunch bag in the passenger seat and his radio on low. He wasn’t sure if Geno would actually be up to a solid meal, yet, what with his teeth and all, but maybe it would be a nice treat.

Geno was in the kitchen when he let himself in, standing over the stove frowning at a pot full of synthetic blood, the counter beside him littered with open spice bottles—cinnamon, cumin, some kind of curry powder. The whole room smelled of it, a little nauseating.

“Experimenting?” Sid asked, dropping his bag on the counter and peering into the pot. Some of it was burnt to the sides in dark streaks. “You should probably turn that down.”

“Trying to follow recipe, but,” Geno said, and turned the heat off and scrunched his nose up at the smell. “Think fresh blood probably better.”

“Lemme taste,” Sid said, and pulled a wooden spoon from the hook and spooned up some of it, blowing across it to cool it down and swallowing it with a grimace. “Yeah, that’s uh—that’s not great.” Sid fished the steak out of the bag. It was wrapped in butcher paper and dripping, nearly room temperature now. “I brought this, but I wasn’t sure if your mouth was too sore.”

“Maybe I try,” Geno said, dumping the rest of the synthetic concoction into a Tupperware and venting the top and closing the lid. When Sid looked at his face, he could see his eyes darkened, his mouth slack staring at the pink splotched package in Sid’s hand like it was, well—like it was a piece of meat.

“Um,” Sid said, and set the package back down on the counter, thankful that he hadn’t eaten since the morning, and Geno wouldn’t be able to see him flush.

He felt like maybe would need the real blood to get through tonight, something more satisfying than just a mug of synthetic while he tried not to think about how dinners with Geno used to go: Geno eating some human nonsense, happy and chatty, and then sweetly settling down in the chair next to Sid’s and brushing his own hair behind his ear, exposing the line of his neck for Sid to bite.

Geno rooted through the dishwasher and came back with two plates much too large for just half a steak each, and stood distractingly close to Sid’s shoulder while Sid unwrapped the package and portioned it out.

“Sorry if it’s a bit cold,” Sid said, crumpling the paper package up and tossing it into the trash under the sink. “I took it out to thaw, but the center might still be—“

“Cold is fine,” Geno said, eyes jumping around from the raw glistening meat on the plate to the smears of pink blood on Sid’s hands. When Sid stuffed his hands under the running tap, Geno finally grabbed the plates and took them to the table, setting them both at one end, the various knick-knacks and mail littering the surface of it discarded to the other.

Sid looked out the window over the sink, where the sun was nearly all the way set, filtering softly through the trees beyond Geno’s backyard. The sky was dark pink, the color of dinner, and Sid’s ancient, twisted-up insides. He breathed in and back out.  
Everything would work out if Sid tried hard enough. Geno was learning, and growing stronger and more adept each day, and Sid didn’t feel any sort of way about it, or about Geno at all. Only the ways he should feel: proud, and happy that he was still alive.

Or well, _alive_.  
Except, when Sid slid into his seat at the table, Geno was sitting close enough that their knees touched in the space underneath, and he was poking at his meal, prodding his pointer finger into the center until the blood ran out the sides.

“Use a fork,” Sid said, dropping a fork and knife down in front of him. “I didn’t come over to watch you play with your food.” Sid stared for a moment with his own fork hovering over his plate. He couldn’t believe that he was having all these feelings about a guy who was seriously considering picking a raw steak up with his bare hands and ingesting the whole thing in one gruesome, bloody piece.

He turned his gaze back to his own plate. He might be undead, but the past century at the very least hadn’t taken away his table manners.  
“Do you need help?” Sid asked, mouth still half full of food, when he looked back up to find Geno looking at him. Geno just looked back down and began sawing off a corner of his steak, shoving the too-big bite in his mouth, chewing gingerly and then sitting there with it stuffed in his cheek, eyes closed like he was halfway to nirvana.

Sid didn’t want to tell him that it paled in comparison to the feeling of someone’s pulse beating under your tongue, the sweet, thick rush of blood, alive and tinged with feeling. Animal blood was good, miles better than the synthetic stuff that he sucked down every day out of necessity, but it wasn’t a living, breathing thing in your lap, your willing teammate curled up next to you and trusting you to—

Sid shoved another forkful in his mouth, and then another. He tried to focus on the taste of it, metallic and thick and cold, his canines fully dropped now and gnashing through the muscle. If he focused hard enough, he wouldn’t think about pressing Geno’s neck to the side and laying his teeth in over the faded scar, how he could take more, now that Geno was already undead.

He shook himself out of it, physically jostling himself in his chair. This whole thing was ridiculous. Geno submitting so sweetly to him was in the past, a thing long buried.

He needed to leave the past in the past.

“It’s good, Sid,” Geno said, leaning back in his chair and dramatically licking his lips and smirking. “Maybe no more juice.”

It would probably be the death of him if he had to watch Geno gleefully devouring raw meat for every meal, thumbing thick blood smears from the corners of his mouth. “Don’t get any ideas,” Sid said, and stood from the table and gathered their plates for the sink.

When he came back, he sat down and left a generous gap between their chairs. “Hey,” he said, and put his hand on Geno’s outstretched arm. “Did you think any more about what I said? I could ask the guys, if you would feel better. Or maybe Max, or one of your other friends?”

“No,“ Geno said, and pulled his arm back to his chest and wouldn’t look at Sid in the eye. “I think—Dr. McLane says it’s best I drink from you.”

“Um,” Sid said, because part of his head was screaming yes, and the part that wasn’t was fuzzed over, thinking back on the Geno in his dream, young and starving, thinking back on Geno in his hotel room, halfway dead with Sid’s blood smeared all over his mouth. He stuffed all of those thoughts away, and said, “That’s probably not a great idea.”

“Why not?” Geno asked, raising his voice a little, like he was incredulous that Sid hadn’t just agreed on the spot. “You not alive. Don’t need. It’s not hurt you, and doctors say like, drink from sire is more—it’s good for you, help you, like—more.”

“I think that’s probably bullshit—” Sid said. “What’s so special about my blood over somebody else’s? It’s not like you know the difference.”

Geno rolled his eyes and scoffed a little in response. “Okay, so maybe it’s bullshit,” he said, and balled all of his napkin scraps up in his hand, rising from his seat and shoving it in so hard that it scraped noisily on the floor. “Still I need control myself, and Dr. McLane say it’s best. Why you argue?”

Sid wasn’t sure why he was so worked up all of a sudden, over just the simple semantics of who he got to snack on. Maybe this was another thing Sid couldn’t remember, the teenager phase. Or maybe it was just Geno. “I wasn’t trying to—“ Sid said, and thought for a second. “If you really need me to—“

“No,” Geno said, and turned to look Sid in the eye, his mouth a sour thin line, his breaths thick and audible. “You don’t want me get better, Sid, just tell me.” He stood up and walked to the sink and turned the tap on, running his mouth under the water.

“That’s not fair,” Sid said, and stood up and circled the room until he was leaning against the counter next to Geno. He had been trying really hard so far. He wasn’t just going to let Geno throw barbs at him and run away. “C’mon, Geno—look at me.”

Geno looked up, and rearranged himself a little, hands stuffed sulkily in his front pockets, like he would listen only begrudgingly to what Sid had to say.

“If you need me to do that for you, it’s going to be—” Sid started, and then reached back to turn the tap off where Geno had left it running. “I’m not gonna say it’s not gonna be weird for me, you know?” He felt nervous to admit it, putting his feelings out there in the open a little, showing his hand. “But I do want to help you, okay? I’m fully committed to it. So if you think it’s the best way, then—”

“Yes,” Geno said, jutting his chin out a little, his expression stubborn. “It’s best. Doctor is say it’s fastest way, best for me be back on ice. So, it’s what I’m want.”

Geno loved to have the last word, to call the shots, and Sid would let him, for now. He looked over at Geno’s face in profile, the thick slope of his nose, his mouth a tight, proud line. His hairline was further up his forehead than it had been, when he’d been Sid’s, years ago—and Sid could see the hints of his scalp now through the artful combover. It was funny how things changed.

“Whatever you want, okay?” Sid said. “We can do it once you start games again, or--we can do it for practice, too, if you feel like you need that.”

Sid watched Geno’s mouth twitch back and forth, like he was mulling it over. “I let you know, okay?” he said. “When I’m ready practice, I let you know.”

—

He knew that he would have to let Geno feed from him, now that he had all but promised, and Geno texted him while he was in Brooklyn, eating his sandwich in the visitor’s lounge before they played the Islanders: **doctor say i practice monday**. Well, that was that, then.

They had an early game on Sunday, and by the time they beat the Flyers and Sid gave his interviews and shot the shit with Flower and showered and changed, it was still not quite nine. Geno had been up in the press box during the game, and he was still lingering around in his suit afterward, traipsing the halls with Gonch, looking tall and pale and too good in his waistcoat, his jacket folded over his arm.

Sid caught his eye as he was loading up his backpack, and Geno waited by the locker room door until Sid came over to ask, “You wanna do it tonight?”

Geno eyed him for a moment. “I tell you, I let you know,” he said.

“Well, I got your text,” Sid said, and hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder and shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket. “Back at practice on Monday, eh? So I guess--”

“Okay,” Geno said, sounding more than a little reluctant. “You insist.” As if Sid was just going to be a dick and renege on his assurance that he would. It would be good for Geno to stave off some of the bloodlust, like he had said. Sid wasn’t going to let him fuck up and bite someone, just because he couldn’t stop thinking about Geno in ways he shouldn’t anymore. It wasn’t his fault that Geno was like this, but he had made it his responsibility. He wanted Geno back on the ice.

“Come over, like thirty minutes,” Geno said, finally, and so Sid lingered around a little longer, stopping by to chat with the ice manager, and letting Dana check in with him about his new gloves, before he left the rink.  
On the drive to Geno’s house, the streets were still busy, and Sid rolled his windows up, missing the quiet of his usual eleven o’clock drive. He would let Geno drink from his wrist, or the inside of his elbow, the same way he had when Geno had turned. It was non-threatening, a friendly offering.

The lights on the ground floor were all on when he arrived, and Geno answered the door after only a single knock, stripped down to just his suit pants, unbuttoned and hanging loosely around his hips.

“Late,” Geno said, and moved aside for Sid to step into the foyer. Sid felt weirdly overdressed in his jacket and sweater, and he was trying not to look at the bare skin of Geno’s chest, the dark tuft of of his chest hair, the lean muscles shifting around in his back as he led Sid through the entryway and into the house.

“Where do you want to, uh—“ Sid asked. Should they do it on the couch, where it was more comfortable? Or in the kitchen, so there was no chance that Sid would slump into Geno’s body? Whatever was easier and more clinical was probably best, to put a kibosh on any feelings he was having.

“Come,” Geno said, and led him through the living room and down a few carpeted steps into the den, where a stack of blankets was crumpled up on one of the chairs, and the TV was playing some Russian news channel on mute. “We do here. Maybe you get tired after, easy for you sleep.”

“You think I’m gonna let you take enough to make me sleepy?” Sid asked, shucking his coat off and throwing it over the back of a chair and wiping his clammy hands on his pants.

Geno just walked past him and sat down on the ottoman, right on top of the Penguins blanket he had draped across it. He looked at Sid and smiled and patted a hand on the chair in front of him, expecting Sid to come and sit down.  
Sid thought about pulling his sweater off, but he didn’t want to make Geno think he was hoping for anything more than a friendly blood transfusion, and he pulled his hands from the hem and shoved his sleeves up to his elbows instead, far enough that the blood wouldn’t spill over.

“You scare?” Geno asked, leaning back on his hands, splayed comfortably, when Sid didn’t move any closer.

“Why would I be—“ Sid said, “I’ve been biting people for close to a hundred years now, do you really think I’m scared of feeding you a little?” He moved to sit down, gingerly dropping into the chair, their knees close together.

Geno just shrugged. “You never let me have before,” he said. “Maybe it’s because you afraid.”

Sid couldn’t look at him, his smug grin, his teeth sharp and dropped down, his whole torso exposed to Sid’s eyes. Why was he even half naked in the first place? He was being so friendly about the whole thing, sweet and accommodating, trying to consider Sid’s needs. The blankets, the den; all of it was so much more than Sid had expected.  
Sid just smiled and didn’t respond. It was probably better that way. There had been a thousand reasons, most of which were that Geno wanted so openly to be turned and Sid knew he was just being used for it, to satisfy Geno’s desire to be—immortal? His bloodlust? Sid didn’t really know, but Geno had been far too young to know what he was asking for, and Sid had been, maybe not afraid, but certainly concerned that Geno would get what he wanted and just—that would be it.

But Sid didn’t want to be angry now; he wanted to sit here in this plush chair and let Geno suck enough blood from his wrist to calm his nerves and then he wanted to go back home to his own bed and maybe think about it just a little, when he was alone.  
The ottoman scraped against the carpet when Geno pulled it closer, all the way up until Sid had to spread his knees open, wide enough for Geno to slot his own in between. Geno put a hand on Sid’s knee, so large that it covered it entirely.

“If you don’t want, we don’t do,” Geno said, and Sid could feel Geno’s eyes on him, his face averted, looking down at his own lap. Sid could see that Geno was nervous too, a little, through his sheen of bravado. He felt a lingering tenderness about all of it; he wanted it to be a good time.

“No, I—“ Sid said, and looked up to meet Geno’s eyes, his pale cheeks, the points of his canines peeking out of his gapped mouth in a way that Sid felt unfairly into. “We can.”  
Sid could feel his own fangs dropping down, just thinking about it. He needed to control himself; he was too old to be dealing with this stupid involuntary reaction. He closed his eyes and extended his arm, sleeve pushed up all the way, palm up.

“Here?” he heard Geno ask, and he felt Geno’s hand come to steady him, his thumb rubbing over the thin skin of Sid’s wrist, where his heartbeat would be. Sid could swear he could feel the phantom racing of his heart in his chest, his palm growing clammier in Geno’s grasp.

For a second, he opened his eyes, like maybe seeing Geno bent over his arm would make it less overwhelming, which was stupid to think, because it was _more_. It was monumentally worse to watch the shift of Geno’s shoulders as he bent forward, to see his hair falling over his forehead and the careful way he was holding onto Sid, his eyes closed, mouth hanging open obscenely. When he lifted Sid’s wrist and licked across the expanse of it once and then twice, and then set his teeth over it, the points pressing in just a little bit, Sid felt like the room might collapse around him.  
All of it was worse, somehow, than the bite, when it came. It was painful, but certainly not the most painful thing that Sid had ever felt, not even close, and Geno sucked cautiously for a moment, like he was still feeling it out or holding himself back.

It had been a while since Sid had been bitten by anyone other than himself, maybe two decades now; but he felt like after this he might not remember the bite of anyone else. The tentative way that Geno suckled on him and the slow pull of blood through the veins of his forearm was driving him mad, and he could feel himself growing interested in it, that squirmy, tense feeling in his gut.

How had he thought he could do this with some manner of professionalism? He was clearly in over his head. None of his feelings about Geno had disappeared.  
The slow speed of Geno drinking only prolonged it, the pleasure going on for minutes longer than it should have, and by the time Geno grew confident enough to grip his arm tight and apply thick, deep pulls of suction, Sid was all the way hard, straining against the rough line of his zipper.

Sid hoped, foolishly, that Geno might not notice, that he’d be so distracted and full that Sid could just cross his legs and hide his embarrassment. But when Geno pulled off, he didn’t back away at all, and Sid couldn’t move his legs without kicking Geno directly in the head.

Geno just stayed bent over him, Sid’s hand in his hands, blood running a little down Sid’s wrist. He looked up at Sid and his eyes were so fucking dark from the blood and the dim light of the den that Sid couldn’t see the brown of his irises at all; his mouth was dark red with Sid’s blood, his breath heavy and humid, puffing over the skin of Sid’s arm.  
“Um,” Sid said, because the run of blood from his wrist wasn’t getting any slower, running down into Geno’s palm. After a moment, Geno looked down and seemed to realize his mistake, and set his tongue back over it, licking back and forth, soft and wet and warm until Sid’s blood had slowed.

“Sorry,” Geno said, and turned Sid’s hand over to lick the blood from where it was smeared there, and then raised his own hand to his mouth to clean it in turn. Sid felt like he was physically separating from his own body, his dick impossibly hard, watching the quick flash of Geno’s tongue in the webbing between his fingers.

It was all so much more intimate than he had remembered, and he needed to get out of here and back to his house so he could take a cold shower and fall face first into bed. He raised his unbitten hand to his mouth to cough, in lieu of having anything to say.

“Uh,” he said, and braced both hands on the chair’s arms. “Can I—I need to take a leak.” It was a lie, but maybe it would get Geno to move already, to back up and stop looking at him like that, in that way that made Sid feel caught, that way that said he was _interested_ , maybe.  
He hauled himself up when Geno moved, and he pointedly didn’t meet Geno’s eyes when he hobbled his way out of the room and down the hall. He knew that there was no way that Geno hadn’t seen his erection, tenting the front of his jeans so obviously, but what could he do? Maybe he could just pretend it hadn’t happened at all, just ignore it and hope Geno wouldn’t bring it up, and that he wouldn’t need to feed like this again, that he could just get by.  
Sid stayed in the bathroom long enough for his teeth to retract and erection to flag, and flushed the empty toilet and splashed cool sink water on his face, trying to feel less like his whole body was burning up. When he walked back down the hall, Geno was lingering in the kitchen, a t-shirt pulled on inside out, pants still unbuttoned, drinking water from the running tap. Sid laughed a little to himself; it felt like he was looking at a picture, a snapshot of Geno a decade ago, the Geno that was Sid’s.

Geno scurried over when he saw Sid standing there and awkwardly placed a hand on his arm. “Okay?” he asked, his hand sliding down until it encircled Sid’s bitten wrist. “If I take too much, maybe—sorry.” He hadn’t, but he stood there with Sid’s arm in his hand and prodded at it for a moment, like somehow this was really the problem, and not Sid being too into it.

“It’s fine,” Sid said, and pulled his arm back, and went into the foyer and hoisted his discarded backpack over his shoulder, and slipped on his shoes. “See you in the morning,” he said, and waved curtly at Geno as he opened the door into the cool spring night.

He drove back in silence with the windows down, feeling more awake than he had all day, and when he tried to go to sleep, he just tossed and turned, thinking about his blood rolling around in Geno’s mouth, and what would have happened if Geno had—if Geno had reached forward and touched him, or kissed him, any number of impossible things.

Under the covers, his dick was starting to chub up again, and he groaned and rolled over and pressed it hard into the mattress until he could will himself into sleep.

—

Geno brought his jacket to practice the next day, and dropped it in Sid’s lap while he was tying his skates. Sid looked up the long line of Geno’s body, up his swishy rink pants and his shirt pulled down over his hands. His hair was fluffed up on one side like he’d just rolled out of bed, his cheeks still flushed a little from his late-night meal.

“Thanks,” Sid said, and reapplied his attention to his skates, hopeful that Geno would find something else to do. After a while he did, walking over to shout at Phil for dumping his gear in Geno’s empty stall.

Sid was happy to have Geno back at practice, and he could tell that Geno was too, skating around like a menace, slapping the cage with his stick when he zoomed by. But Sid kept having to face-off against him, and Geno spent every single second looking at him like he wanted to ask him something, eyes hard and inquisitive on Sid’s face.

Sid shoveled the puck away from him while he was distracted, and skated sharply away and didn’t feel bad at all.

Toward the end of the skate, they all did a battle drill in the neutral zone, playing keep-away for a while until one person was left standing. It was a fairly routine game, and didn’t usually involve much body contact, but at some point Sid looked over and Rusty was on his ass on the ice, helmet off and holding a hand to his cheek.

Sid could smell the blood, not a lot of it, but enough, and he tensed as the drill ground to a halt, everyone looking over at Rusty. Sid leaned hard on his stick and watched Geno for signs of reaction; he looked like an alert dog, like his ears were perked up at attention, his nose raised. But he didn’t skate closer, he just stood there, Phil’s hand crooked around the back of his pants like he was aware of the possibility that Geno might cause a scene.

Except he didn’t cause a scene at all; he was fine, and in the change room afterward Sid sidled up next to Geno and bumped his hip. “It worked, eh?” he said.

“How you know it’s you?” Geno said, and sprayed himself with a generous amount of deodorant and threw the can to the back of his locker. “Maybe I’m more strong than you think.”

“Yeah, okay,” Sid said. “We should probably do it again before you play, though. Just let me know. Whenever you want--I’m free for it.” He felt confident that they could keep going with it. It had worked, Geno hadn’t been too taken aback by Sid liking it. It was clear that he’d liked it, too, in some way, maybe even in the ways that Sid secretly hoped.

Maybe they could make it a regular part of their routine again. As easy as bloody pregame protein shakes, or two touch, or Geno’s weirdly soggy blood-drenched toast.

“Don’t think I need again,” Geno said, turning away to zip up his backpack. “Maybe next week, you know. Don’t need do so often. It’s fine.”

He hoisted his backpack on his shoulder and tossed his laundry bag toward the bin, missing it by at least three feet as he strode from the change room into the hall. Sid stood there staring into space until Tanger strode past and shoulder-checked him.

“Eyes open, buddy,” he said, as Sid jostled off balance a little. Sid wasn’t sure what Geno’s deal was--maybe he _had_ thought it was weird that Sid was so into it. It seemed pretty hypocritical, considering how much he’d fallen apart every time Sid had so much as grazed him, back then.

Well, maybe he was just trying not to take up too much of Sid’s time with it, or maybe he really was feeling that much better. Maybe all that nonsense about a sire’s blood being good for you was true.

Sid guessed he could only hope.

—

Geno was cleared to play in game two, at home against the Rangers, and things slowly went to shit. He was tense on the bench, breathing with his head down, drinking more water than Sid thought was probably strictly necessary, and at first Sid thought it was just nerves—he hadn’t played for a good few weeks, and it was playoffs and added pressure.

The game itself was fraught already, and by the start of the third, they were down 4-1. When Geno went hard on a couple of guys in the corners after Kreider’s goal, probably he was just trying to get himself back in it.

Halfway through the period, Geno and Klein got into it, knockdown and drag out and Sid could feel the energy of the past year’s playoff exit in the air, the sour funk of defeat. Around him, the bench was going wild, a number of guys rapping their sticks on the boards, audible over the grumbling of the crowd.

Geno never really liked to fight, and when Klein right hooked him, Geno was barely holding on, and Sid thought that would be the end of it—Geno would surrender like he always did, and flail and get surly about it and huff off to the penalty box like a disgruntled animal, disappointed and angry in equal measure.

But he didn’t let go, and before Sid really registered what was happening at all, Geno was grappling at the neck of Klein’s jersey and pressing his helmeted head to the side and biting down and—

Sid felt like he couldn’t move. On the ice, the linesmen were tearing them apart, and on the bench, Sullivan was shouting at him to go intervene, as if that would somehow help matters at all. One of the linesmen towed Geno over to their bench and Sid could see his wild eyes and his teeth still dropped down, little pinpricks of blood at the corners of his mouth.

Geno locked eyes with him as he was carted down the tunnel, and Sid felt like he was blacking out, his stomach riding up into his throat, the noise of the arena funneled down into a droning hum.

The rest of the game played out inside that weird space. He battled in the corners and slid the puck forward to Tanger and made a couple of backdoor passes on autopilot and just couldn’t stop thinking about it—Geno on the ice with his teeth bared, angry and hungry and out of control, Geno probably stuck in the locker room now, nursing his ego with the equipment guys fussing over him, hopefully feeling some manner of regret for his idiotic actions.

When the buzzer sounded, Sid waited like always for the rest of the guys to exit the ice, and followed after them, wobbling through the halls on his skates, feeling a low, simmering anger growing inside him with every step. How could he have been so stupid to think that Geno was just—that he was ready to be in control of himself, as if Sid had actually taught him how to resist at all. He was furious with Geno, for fighting Klein in the first place, and getting himself ejected from the game, and ensuring that no one would remember any of his good plays on the ice tonight. But he was more furious with himself—for being stupid enough to believe that Geno would probably be fine.

Geno wasn’t in the locker room when Sid got there, but he was in the lounge in his track pants after, drinking blood straight from the plastic pack with his forehead in his hand. He looked pitiful, and frustrated, and Sid felt the anger draining out of his body as he walked over and dropped down into the chair next to him.

“Sorry,” Geno said, when he turned his head to see who it was that had interrupted his sulk. “I’m stupid. Don’t know what—“

Sid held a hand up. “Don’t,” he said. “It was a pretty boneheaded move, but you don’t need to apologize to me.” He would probably need to apologize to Klein at some point, and to Sullivan, who had been casually scowling in Sid’s direction since Geno had been led off the ice.

“I need be more careful,” Geno said, and rubbed his hand over his eyes and down along the line of his face. When he rested it on the table, some blood had smeared from his mouth to his palm. Sid averted his gaze across the room.

“You probably should have told me, if you were feeling this bad,” Sid said. “I don’t know why we couldn’t just do it again today, or before practice yesterday like I asked.”

“I don’t feel so bad, you know?” Geno said, “Just feel angry, can’t score, and Klein making me so mad and I’m hungry and—“ He trailed off and tried to suck some more blood from the bag and mostly looked helpless as it dribbled down his chin and onto his shirt. “It’s kind of like--It’s kind of weird, you know? I don’t think so at first, but when I drink from you, like, all I can think is.” He put his hand and the bag on the table in defeat, the blood seeping sadly out the sides. “I don’t know. It’s weird.”

“You’re a mess,” Sid said, and swiped the bag from him and took it to the sink, pulling cups from the cupboard and draining the rest of the bag into them in roughly equal portions and then bringing both back to the table. “Here.”

“Thanks,” Geno said, curling a bruised hand around the mug and smiling, soft and a little scrunched up. They sat there in silence for a few minutes, as Sid drained his cup and Geno sipped at his, like somehow it was less palatable when it wasn’t straight out of the container. Sid didn’t want to think at all about how he found it kind of cute—it was infuriating, and terribly childish—so he hid his smile in the empty space of his upturned mug.

When they were both done, Sid grabbed the empties and carted them to the dishwasher, and rinsed the blood bag out the rest of the way and discarded it in the recycling bin under the sink, thinking the whole time about how probably this was at least a little bit his fault, for not being more insistent. What did Geno know about the ins and outs of being a vampire? Certainly not much at all.

“Listen,” he said, when he turned around and Geno was still hunched over in his seat. He came over and placed a hand on his shoulder, squeezing a little until Geno looked up at him. “If you’re hungry before games, or whenever, you need to ask, okay?“ He paused for a second, looking down on Geno’s upturned face, his small crows feet, the crooked shape of his nose—the way he would look now, for the rest of eternity. “I know it’s a little weird, and maybe we can revisit the idea of you feeding from someone else, if you want that, but you need to let me know what’s going on for real, okay? I can’t read your mind.”

He patted Geno on the shoulder a couple of times, and broke Geno’s gaze and looked down at his own hands.

“Okay,” Geno said, and looked up at Sid for the barest second, his face just open enough that Sid thought maybe he could be hopeful that they would figure this whole thing out. “I ask.”

—

Geno was suspended for game three for his antics, but he made the trip to New York with them, and lingered around in his track pants before the game, throwing the soccer ball around like always, bent over laughing when Sid went to kick and it flew well past his leg.

At breakfast the next morning, Geno slid in next to him in the scratchy padded booth, bumping their hips together.

“What are you eating?” Sid asked, when he noticed that Geno’s plate was piled high with an assortment of complimentary breakfast delicacies: bacon, three biscuits, a whole, un-cut orange. He opened his hand and at least ten packs of jelly slid out onto the table. “That’s not really what I meant by ‘satiating your hunger’, you know.”

“It’s good,” Geno said, and shrugged, picking up a spoon and slathering jelly all over the top and bottom of one of the biscuits. Sid couldn’t even remember what bread tasted like, at this point. Meat was one thing, or greens, or juice—things that he could put in smoothies or soups. But bread didn’t offer him anything he couldn’t get anywhere else; it wasn’t high on his list.

“Don’t forget about _actual_ food,” Sid said, opening the top of his travel mug and gulping a few sips, the blood still nice and warm from his suite microwave. He looked at Geno while he drank.

“Liquid diet is boring,” Geno said, but when Sid set the mug down, Geno reached over and grabbed it and sipped from it dramatically, licking his lips after just to grind Sid’s gears.

“I can’t believe you,” Sid said.

Across the table, Tanger was watching the whole exchange with amused eyes, laughing into his coffee. “You guys are idiots,” he said, and reached over to pilfer a strip of bacon from Geno’s plate, probably just to watch Geno yelp and squabble at him about it.

When most of the team had departed, up to their rooms to change or to the practice facility for a workout, Geno stole the last sip of Sid’s blood and leaned into him to say, “I think maybe I need it, tonight.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sid asked. He was a little surprised that Geno wanted to take him up on it so quickly. Maybe his surliness and his weirdness around the whole thing was like Sid’s and he was just having, well--feelings about it.

“Maybe we do at dinner,” Geno said. “Very important captain meeting, team understands.”

“You want Kuni there too?” Sid asked, elbowing Geno a little, his eyebrows raised. Geno’s face was far too serious, his lips tight like asking was paining him a little, like he had to reach down inside and wrestle the words from his throat. Sid elbowed him again for good measure, to try to get him to break a smile.

“Just you,” Geno said, and looked down at his hands and then back at Sid, a tentative smile blooming across his face.

“Okay,” Sid said, and leaned into him for a moment, a little more than just friendly and easy, and didn’t stop himself from patting Geno’s thigh a few times as he hurried him from the booth. Tonight would come soon enough, but there was practice to get to, and plenty of things other than Geno feeding from him to focus on. “Just us.”

—

Sid was lying back in bed with his eyes closed, a book unfolded on his lap, when his phone buzzed on the bedside table. **what u room number???**

 **407** Sid replied, and then wondered for a moment if maybe he should tidy up a bit, or change out of his jeans, or—well, he wasn’t sure what. Should the TV still be on when Geno came upstairs? Would Geno want to hang out for a bit, or just get right down to it?

He was cut short from any ruminating by a knock on the door, and whatever he had on would have to suffice. It was just Geno, he wasn’t sure why he suddenly felt like it mattered.

Geno stood awkwardly in the doorframe when it was opened, tall and round-shouldered, looking irritatingly good in his sweater and khakis. Now that half of his blood was basically synthetic, Sid wasn’t so distracted by the smell of it, but instead he was distracted by everything else about how Geno smelled, the homey smell of detergent, the spicy smell of whatever cologne he’d doused himself in after practice.

“You gonna come in?” Sid asked, after Geno lingered there a weirdly long time. He stepped aside to let Geno pass by and Geno shook himself off a little and shuffled inside, plopping himself down on the edge of one of the beds, the one that Sid had been sitting in.

“What you watch?” Geno asked, nodding his head to the TV, where a montage of the streets of Victorian England was playing.

“Uh,” Sid said. Geno knew full well that Sid liked to watch history channel specials, a little bit to reminisce, but mostly to bitch about how many things they got wrong. It felt kind of weird to be caught at it now, thinking about Geno sitting between his legs all those years ago, shoving handfuls of pretzels in his mouth as Sid muttered complaints into his hair. Geno used to lean his head on Sid’s knee, scrubbing his hair behind his ear, baring his neck to distract him. Sid was embarrassed to admit how often it had worked. “It’s just some piece on the lead-up to the war,” he said, and fished around on the bed for the discarded remote. “I can turn it off.”

“It’s fine,” Geno said, but Sid muted the sound anyway, and came around to stand at the end of the bed. Should he sit down? Well, maybe Geno would want to do it some other way.

“So how do you, uh,” Sid said, and scratched at the back of his neck. His skin was prickly all over, nervous and eager anticipation coursing through him. “How do you wanna do this?”

“Maybe sit,” Geno said, and patted the space next to him on the mattress until Sid obliged and sat down, leaving very little space between them. He wanted to be professional about it if that was what Geno wanted, but more than that he wanted to feel the soft shape of Geno’s thigh against his, cool and familiar through the material of his pants.

“Same as last time?” Sid asked, already rolling up his sleeve.

“C’mere. Up,” Geno said, and scooted up the bed some, wobbling around and crossing his legs. He fluffed the pillows up and patted them noisily, leaving a space for Sid to slide in.

Sid went, thinking about being comfortable and warm in Geno’s den, how much his body had floated on the feeling of being fed on. Maybe he would try to focus a little on the TV, and hope that the explosions and the long droning footage of stone masonry would dull some of his enjoyment. He was hopeful, but he didn’t want to be, well--he didn’t want to be _too_ eager.

“This okay?” Geno asked, picking up Sid’s arm once he’d settled in. “Wrist?”

“Um, well--” Sid said. “You could do it from somewhere else, if you wanted.” Maybe Geno would want to bite the sensitive skin of his inner elbow, or his neck. He was only a little ashamed to admit that he would let him.

Geno looked at him for a moment, brow furrowed. “Wrist fine,” he said.

Well, maybe he preferred it that way. Sid had always liked the warm curve of a neck, soft and yielding under his mouth, but that didn't mean--Geno was welcome to have his own interests. It wasn't as if feeling the blood rush from his wrist _didn't_ feel good.

Sid smiled tightly and nodded at him to proceed, and turned his focus to the screen, and tried not to feel Geno cradling his forearm, or the brush of his hair on Sid’s skin when he bent to get close. He felt the warm swipe of Geno’s tongue, and he clenched and unclenched his other hand in the sheets. On screen, a woman was prattling on in a room filled with dusty old books, and Sid thought unkindly that it was probably a curated set, the books all just-so, the globe behind her a cheap, decorative model.

When Geno bit down, Sid felt the harsh swoop of arousal in his stomach. There was no way he could distract himself; it felt too good, maybe better than it had the first time. Geno’s lips were slick where they framed his wrist, and the pull of blood was sharp and stinging and when Sid glanced out of the corner of his eye, he could see the tender curve of Geno’s cheek, and all he wanted to do was cup it in his hand and raise Geno’s face to his and lick into his mouth to clean out the blood.

Fuck.

He scrambled to try to do anything with his breath, taking long, steady sips of air, staring so hard at the stain on the carpet and the planes whirring across the TV screen, centering himself to focus on the smells around them, anything else, anything at all.

Somewhere outside, someone was walking down the hall wearing too much perfume, and their heartbeat was noisy and quick, but no matter how hard Sid tried to hone in on it, all that filled his head was the thick pleasure of blood draining out of his arm, and the awful sound of Geno groaning around each mouthful. Geno was such a sloppy eater, still, after a whole month. Sid felt embarrassed that it was making him so fucking hard.

“Geno,” he said, after a while, because if Geno didn't stop he might just come right here. Sid tapped him on the shoulder a few times, and squeezed his own legs together like it would do anything to quell his erection. “Geno, c’mon, that’s enough.”

Geno’s mouth was filthy when he pulled off, and he was breathing heavy, the same way he did when he was fresh from a hard shift on the ice. “Have to clean,” he said, and bent carefully to lick over the bite until it sealed shut. Sid couldn’t look away; his eyes felt glued down, stuck to the soft swirl of the crown of Geno’s head, thinking about all the times Geno had let him bend over and suck a little from his wrist, unstrapping his wrist wrap and shoving his jersey sleeve up hastily in between periods.

Geno used to cup his hands around Sid’s head to hold him in place, indulging his indulgence. Sid looked at Geno’s hair and couldn’t think of many reasons not to just sink his hands in and—

“Done,” Geno said, pulling off again, his mouth open and shiny wet from his own spit, his eyes dark, dark brown. Sid felt like he had half a brain cell left, maybe. His dick was so hard, and Geno looked too—and he felt like—

Sid put a free hand on Geno’s cheek, where it was warm and flushed with blood, and dragged it down until his thumb caught on Geno’s dropped fang. Everything in Sid’s body was yelling at him to just lean in and kiss him, because his body was literally the biggest idiot of all time, reckless and stupid, irrational. Probably they should talk about this, before Sid just. Instead he just lingered with his thumb in Geno’s mouth and said, “They’re real sharp.”

Geno laughed, then, and Sid could feel the puff of breath against his fingers. “Not sure why you surprise,” he said. “You sharp too, you make me. I’m same.” Geno wouldn’t stop looking Sid straight in the eye; and it felt like he could see right through him, all the way down to his sick insides.

“Sid?” Geno asked, and dragged his eyes down to Sid's lap and back up, his gaze just as hungry as it had been coming up from his meal. Sid jerked away instinctively, and then settled. If Geno was looking at him like that, then maybe he felt, and maybe they could--

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to just go for it, he thought, as he watched Geno’s hand settle on his hip again, and sweep up over his pocket and up under the hem of his shirt to finger the button of his jeans. Geno’s hands were cold, now, and Sid sucked his stomach in a little at the first brush of their skin, breathing in a sharp hiss as Geno explored.

“Sorry,” Geno said, and went to pull his hand back a little, hovering over Sid’s lap like he wasn’t sure if he should continue.

“No it’s—“ Sid said, rearranging his legs a little, spreading them out at the ankles to give himself some relief. “It’s fine.”

Geno’s gaze hadn’t moved from his lap; he wouldn’t look Sid in the eye. Sid was a little thankful for it, because he didn’t know if he would be able to handle it at all if Geno looked at him, if Sid could see whatever emotion was blatantly smeared across his face.

Geno’s hands lowered back down to his jeans, sliding the button from its hole, his palm settled over the curve of Sid’s dick. Sid felt his dick trying to get harder, even though it was clearly impossible that he could be any more turned on.

The show he’d been watching was still going, the flash of the screen flickering across the side of Geno’s face, off the plush curve of his mouth, gapped open as he stared and undid Sid’s zipper and reached in to take him out of his briefs.

“Shit,” Sid said, when Geno’s cool hand closed around him. He was definitely not going to last in any way, maybe not even a whole minute, with Geno’s hand jacking him like he was exploring, fingers moving over Sid’s foreskin to press it down. Sid bit down on his own lip to shut himself up and then hissed and swore again when they broke skin and he realized his fangs had dropped.

“Sid,” Geno said, and bent closer to him, so much so that Sid thought for a moment that Geno might stick out his tongue and touch him with it, which would be just—the thought of it had him screwing his eyes shut tight and thrusting up into Geno’s hand once, twice and messing himself, squirting out over his lap and Geno’s fist and probably, well—

When he opened his eyes, Geno was looking at him and smiling, a splash of come stuck to his cheek. “Messy,” he said, and tutted his tongue like Sid always did to him, when Geno ate too quickly and got blood on himself. He raised his eyebrows and wiped the come off with a finger and stuck it into his mouth and didn’t move his gaze from Sid’s in any way at all.

Sid felt wrung out, letting his weight move off of his hands, his body settling back into the bed, not sure what to say. Maybe he could convince Geno to stay the night, and they could crawl into bed together and share one single body’s worth of blood. Maybe Geno would let Sid bite him a little, or stick his hand down Geno’s pants, or really anything at all.

But Geno didn’t move to lie down with him. He just ducked his gaze down and said, “Thanks, Sid,” and pressed forward on his hands, leaning up to kiss Sid’s cheeks, once on each side like he always liked to, and then once to the corner of his mouth before he pulled away.

Sid didn’t want to feel any sort of way about it, but he couldn’t help himself. Geno was sweet and blood-drunk, just some weird undead version of the Geno that had so sweetly submitted to him all those years ago. It was dredging up so many of Sid’s dormant feelings, too many to push down. When Geno smiled at him, he couldn’t resist smiling back, small and stiff with his sore lip.

“No problem,” he heard himself say, and he only nearly resisted asking Geno if he wanted Sid to flip them over and reciprocate. He could see Geno’s erection a little chubby in his shorts, not all the way hard, but getting there, full of a mix of their blood. “Hope it uh—“ he said, and held his hand over his mouth to cover a cracking yawn. “Hope it helps.”

He closed his eyes then, exhausted from the blood loss and the orgasm and the general stress of holding himself together. Under him, the bed didn’t move, and he heard Geno scratching a little at his hair and his neck, and futzing with his pants.

“I play better tomorrow,” he heard Geno say as he was drifting, his voice sounding far away, and the last thing he felt before he yawned and fell under was Geno standing up from the bed and bending down to press his lips once more to Sid’s cheek.

—

He slept like the dead, without dreams, and in the morning he blinked awake blearily and patted the empty side of the bed where last night Geno had been.

Every nerve in his body felt hopeful, he felt warm all over even though he was sure that he wasn’t. Geno hadn’t stayed the night, like Sid had wanted, but he’d drank from him and looked at him so sweetly and Sid just, he was sure that it had to be a sign. He felt like he had been remembering all along, and now Geno was remembering with him. Maybe they could get over it, together, the lingering hurts of their past.

Sid took his thoughts with him to the game, and smiled at Geno in the kitchen while he made his pre-game shake and Geno made the toast with jam that he’d been making for the past decade and then just dunked the end in a mug of cold blood like that was any real solution to eating.

“That’s really disgusting,” Sid said, and stuck a straw in his shake and took a huge sip of the grainy middle.

Geno just shoved another piece in his mouth shamelessly and downed the mug of blood with his eyebrows raised, and left the empties on the counter like a slob and strode past. “I play good tonight,” he said, his hand rounded around Sid’s shoulder, the same thing he’d said to Sid not twenty-four hours before.

But he was right—he played out of his mind—gliding around the ice like a fucking shark, dishing a slick pass to set up Fehrsy’s goal within the first two minutes of the game, jolting the power play into three of the game’s five goals, two off the end of his own stick. Each time they scored, Sid looked up to find Geno looking at him, eyes wild and bright, cheeks still pink from feeding and exertion. Sid tried not to think too much about how that blood was his own as he slid himself into the familiar space under Geno’s arm, but he couldn’t help himself.

Geno was weird and cagey with him for the next few days, all through flying home to beat the Rangers and into the next week. Maybe he was just processing his feelings, or needed space to be by himself for a while. Sid couldn’t begrudge him that. He knew that Geno had always been one to mull things over until he ran them into the ground.

Well, maybe Sid would just need to be more upfront with him: reach out and be obvious about what he wanted, and how much he cared. He knew that he had made mistakes with Geno in the past, but surely they could overcome them, they could try again.

On their first road trip to Washington, Sid found Geno lingering around by the elevators the night before the game and came up behind him to put a hand on his arm. “Hey,” he said, and smiled upward when Geno looked his way.

Geno looked back at him with narrowed eyes. “What, Sid?”

“You were looking a little wild out there last game,” Sid said as they rode the elevator up to their floor. He’d looked down the bench at the end of the second period and caught Geno staring at Rusty’s bloody nose a little too long for comfort. “You could probably use some help with that, eh?”

“Don’t need,” Geno said, and stepped off the elevator and turned the corner. “It’s fine.”

“C’mon,” Sid said, following his steps, taking long strides to keep up. “Don’t you remember what happened last time? I thought we agreed that you were going to ask--”

“Fine,” Geno said, and stopped at his door and slid the keycard in abruptly, back and forth until it beeped and lit green and let them in. He stepped aside to let Sid through into the room and went over and flopped onto the bed, tossing his coat on his suitcase and neglecting to take off his shoes. “Only a little, though--I not really need.”

Why was Geno getting so upset about this? He’d seemed so on board with the plan, and receptive to Sid’s attempts to keep things light. Barely a week ago he’d kissed Sid so tenderly, his mouth still smelling faintly of Sid’s blood and come. Had something happened during the game? Things really weren’t adding up, here.

“Hey,” Sid said, and came over to sit on the corner of the mattress. “Is there something going on that you’re not telling me?”

“Nothing is go on, Sid--” Geno said, still flopped on his back with his arm over his face, talking to the ceiling. “I’m tell you--everything in game is fine, I really don’t need.”

“Is it something I did?” Sid asked. He was really just grasping for straws now, picking apart the confusing muddle of Geno’s behavior and emotions. His stomach flipped over uneasily. “If I did something wrong, you need to tell me.” Had he pushed too hard? He had been trying to read Geno’s signs, and Geno had seemed not wholly unreceptive, and sure, it had certainly _emboldened_ Sid into letting his feelings seep out a little, but.

“Why I have to say?” Geno said, and pushed himself up to sit, his arm flailing out a little, close enough that it nearly hit Sid in the face. “I tell you fine, okay, but still you push! You always pushing, always think you know best.”

Sid felt a sick stab of guilt. Maybe he had been micromanaging a _little_. It wasn’t easy to balance, all of his tender feelings with all of the things that Geno needed to learn. “Listen,” he said, “maybe I have been a little--”

“No,” Geno said, and stood up, pacing to the dresser and back, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. “Not just now, you know? Tell me what to eat, okay, maybe it’s fine, maybe I listen, but. It’s same thing always, you always know what I want, tell me when I’m ready--”

“What are you even getting on me about right now?” Sid asked, frustrated and confused, his whole brain tied in an unsolvable knot. “This all seemed like it was going fine the other day. I mean--you--you kissed me, Geno.” He had thought for a second that maybe Geno was just surly about being treated like a child these past few weeks, which was understandable. But he felt like Geno was talking past him, now, all the way back.

He looked across the room to the window, the late setting sun, and swallowed around the lump in his throat.

“Maybe you one who’s not ready, Sid,” Geno said, ignoring him entirely, soldiering on with his closely-held hurts. His body was long and solid like a statue, leaning against the desk with his face tipped up, expression as somber and defiant as if he were stone.

“Ready for what?” Sid asked, raising his voice enough that he was reasonably sure someone could hear him in the next room over. “If you’re gonna talk to me about this I need you to just--”

“Fine,” Geno said, looking and sounding sharp and mean, his eyes bright with frustration. “Why you even turn me, Sid?”

Geno was mean when he felt thwarted, and Sid knew it, and still he felt cut through every single time. “C’mon, Geno—let’s not—”

“No!” Geno said. “You always say before ‘no’, even when I want. You say I’m too young, I’m not really want, you know best, so why?”

Sid scrubbed his palms up and down over his clammy face. “Did you think I was just going to let you bleed out all over my hotel floor? C’mon.” Geno was an idiot if he thought that Sid would have just let him _die_. Turning him had sucked, but it was better than—there was no way he could have just—

“Maybe you should,” Geno scoffed, childish and petulant, crossing his arms over his chest and looking at Sid with disdainful eyes. “I’m stupid, maybe I deserve. Maybe it’s better than just—stuck with you forever, so stubborn, you won’t even—“

  
Sid’s stomach lurched, his heart heavy, dropping like a stone inside his chest. All he wanted was to crawl across the room into Geno’s arms and spill all of his stupid, soft, tangled-up thoughts all over Geno’s lap. But he knew now that Geno would rebuke him, sharp like the edge of a knife. “What won’t I do, Geno?” he asked, frustrated, feeling turned inside out. “I saved your life, okay, and I’m sorry if that wasn’t what you wanted but—I didn’t know what else to—I’m just trying to help you get through this, okay? We can go back to the way things were as soon as playoffs are over, if you’re so mad at me about it.”

He felt wrung out, at the end of his rope.

  
Geno came over and sat down again, his arms sagging into his lap, his shoulders hunched over, making himself small. “I’m just--” he said, and stopped. “I’m not kid. Not now, for sure, but--I’m not just stupid kid then, either, you know? I know what I want.”

“C’mon, Geno--” Sid said, “you were twenty years old! No one knows what they want, I certainly didn’t.”

“No!” Geno said, “You said I don’t know, but I know. You think I’m just big stupid kid, no friends, all I want is sex and blood, like you so cool, but.” He paused again, the moment stretching out indefinitely in silence.

Sid’s thoughts swirled like a whirlpool inside his head. How had he been so boneheaded, to make Geno think that all Sid thought of him as for all that time was just a fun piece of meat, a living plaything.

“Geno, I--” Sid said, and then couldn’t go on. He didn’t have a clue what to say. What could he say to make Geno feel better? Words seemed entirely insufficient.

“I don’t let you drink me unless I--” Geno said, and looked up at Sid for just a short moment, his eyes glassy and rimmed in red. All Sid wanted to do was reach over and curl Geno inside his grip, but-- “I have feelings, you know? And it’s hurt, when you say ‘no’, and I can’t change.”

“Geno, I’m sorry,” Sid said, for lack of anything better or more eloquent or more helpful. He raised his arm to touch Geno’s back, where it was bent over in a sad, rounded curve, and then thought better of it, and pulled his arm back into his own lap.

Geno didn’t say anything more, just sat there in a small heap, hand rubbing back and forth across his eyes, like maybe Sid would ignore that he was crying.

“Maybe I should go,” Sid said, and rose from the bed. His shoes were still on, and his sweatshirt and everything else, and he only snuck one small glance back at Geno as he forced himself out the door.

 

Sid felt like shit the next day, floating through the rink at morning skate, trying to piece together the tattered scraps of what had happened. It was clear that Geno had been remembering as well, the sweet cocoon of their earlier relationship. Sid could see it on his face when he asked shyly to feed from him, the soft look when he kissed Sid’s cheeks that night in Sid’s bed. But what did it change?

Sid couldn’t stop seeing the shape of him, hunched over on the bed, his eyes wet and muddy with tears. He tossed and turned at night, dreaming unwanted dreams about Geno young and his again, sweet and kind. Dreams about Geno laying unmoving on Sid’s bloody hotel room bed. His subconscious was consumed with it, and it frustrated him that it was just--so much of it was his own fault, the product of his own failings. He had loved Geno, and he still loved him now, and he had hurt him--maybe beyond repair.

Maybe there wouldn’t be a future for them, as lovers: intimate, eternal partners in crime. But Sid would make sure that there could be some future--ten more odd years at least of Geno and hockey, however many years Geno was willing to give.

But he still felt mute whenever he saw Geno, roaming around the rink or the hotel, and he couldn’t get Geno to look him in the eyes during their handshakes, relishing instead in the familiar feeling of Geno’s fist against his chest, right over his silent heart.

By mid-way through the series, he noticed Geno looking particularly pinched around the eyes, breathing heavy on the bench at practice with his fangs out, sucking down a whole shaker of synthetic blood during intermissions. Sid slid past him in the kitchen at the rink to grab a pack of blood one night and and put a cautious hand on Geno’s lower back.

“Feeling alright?” he asked, because Geno hadn’t drunk from him at all since that night in the hotel, and Sid had been too guilty to push him, when it was clear that what he wanted was space.

“Fine, Sid,” Geno snapped, popping the lid back onto his shaker and releasing himself from Sid’s grip and sliding out the door.

Well. Maybe that was that was that, then.

—

On a late flight home one night, midway through the Conference Final, Sid tried and failed to fall asleep, and when he opened his eyes he saw that Flower was awake too, pecking at his phone with the brightness turned down low.

“Hey,” he whispered, and bumped Flower with his shoulder. “Can I ask you something?”

Flower finished typing and slid his phone into the pouch of his hoodie. “Sure, shoot.”

Sid turned his body toward him, and ran a hand through his mussed up hair. “What’s it like, being with a vampire?”

“What do you mean?“ Flower said, looking at him like he had sprouted two extra eyes. “Probably just like being with anyone else, eh?”

“I don’t know, I just—“ Sid said, and stopped for a moment to reorient his thoughts. “You know that Geno and I were together before, right? When he was uh—still human.”

Flower laughed a little, snorting up through his nose. “I had a hunch,” he said, smile spreading across his face.

“C’mon, don’t—“ Sid said, pushing Flower’s smug face away with his hand. “Just listen to me.”

“Okay, okay,” Flower folded his legs up in his seat, turning fully toward Sid now, hands stuffed up in his sweatshirt sleeves the way that Geno always liked to do. “I’m all ears.”

  
Sid took a deep breath. “I just mean, you know—when you get old, and she doesn’t,” he said. “That’s gotta be hard, right? I feel like I never stopped thinking about it.”

“I mean, maybe—“ Flower said, and shrugged a little. “Not really a problem for you now, you know? What with Geno being undead too.”

  
“Yeah, maybe,” Sid said. He looked around the plane: Hags reading his tablet with a book light, Geno sacked out on Tanger’s pillow, the dim aisle lights illuminating the side of his face in a weird glow. “I kind of fucked up, though, like--I spent so much time in my own head all the time, I never really stopped to think about _him_ , you know? He kept asking me to turn him before and I just--I just couldn’t.”

“Why not?” Flower asked.

“I think I was always just afraid he’d--get sick of me or something, that there was no way he could be serious about it, but,” Sid said, and it pained him to think of Geno’s admission of how much it had hurt. He forced his eyes closed and shook his head. “Now he’s pissed at me. I’m a fucking idiot.”

  
“I know his pain, my friend—“ Flower said, and pressed his hand into Sid’s chest until he started to laugh. “I’m pretty sick of you.” Sid laughed in turn, curling in on himself and saying “shh, shh” in hopes that no one around them would wake up and listen in. Satisfied with his teasing, Flower retracted his hand back to his sleeve cocoon and they sat there in the quiet, just existing side by side, the same as always.

  
“Maybe you did fuck up,” Flower said, quietly, out of the long pause. “And maybe I’m not the right person to give you this advice--you know, being human and all.” Sid laughed; maybe it was true. “But anyway, your life isn’t short, but I don’t know why you’d want to waste your time just spinning your wheels on this forever. Feel guilty about it, say you’re sorry, and man up to what you want, you know? Maybe he’ll surprise you.”

“Yeah,” Sid admitted. He didn’t want to spend the rest of their years in the NHL holding himself at careful arm’s length, wondering what could have happened if he’d been man enough to try again, longing eternally for the past. “I’m just, uh—I’m pretty afraid to ask, you know?”

“What’s that saying?” Flower said, and narrowed his gaze and bumped Sid companionably on the shoulder. “You don’t know until you try?”

  
“Oh, you’re so wise, eh?” Sid said, smiling, and bumped him back to his own seat. He readjusted his pillow behind his head, fluffing it up and trying to burrow down for at least an hour nap before they landed. Flower went back to his phone, typing away, and after a few futile minutes with his eyes shut, Sid opened them again to ask. “You really think he’ll forgive me?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Flower said, and looked in the direction of Geno’s sleeping form. “That man does love to hold a grudge.” Sid laughed a little, muffled into his shirtsleeve. It was true. “But I think he probably still cares about you, eh, and anyway, you have all of eternity to figure it out.”

“Well,” he said, and closed his eyes again. He knew that the moment would come, just a little bit longer, hopefully soon. “Maybe not that long.”

—

The morning of Finals media day, Geno took the empty stall next to Sid’s in the change room and sat on the floor to pull on his shoes. “Play good,” he said, looking up at Sid from under the brim of his hat, a tentative smile tugging at his lips. “You excite? It’s finals.”

“Yeah,” Sid said. He was surprised, and unsure of what to say. Geno hadn’t said as much as three terse sentences to him off the ice since Sid had shut the door to his hotel room in Washington. Maybe he was ready to mend things, to salvage together the friendship they’d built, at the very least. “Seven years, eh.”

“Back before seven more,” Geno said, and climbed to his feet and put his hand on Sid’s shoulder. Sid could feel it all the way through his shirt and skin, down to his bones. “Thanks for help, you know? I know I’m--I’m worried it’s hard for me play, but it’s easy now, and we’re here.” He smiled at Sid with a hint of fang and passed on by into the locker room, leaving Sid frozen in place for a moment before he pulled on his shoes and his hat and went out to meet the press.

His feelings had been solidifying inside him, tucked away. He hadn’t thought that he’d make it back, in some ways—finals and Geno and all of it felt so far away, just a part of his past. But here they were, on the edge of something good, maybe—they’d gone all the way.

He didn’t say anything to Geno that day, or the next—Geno was still being mostly cagey, wandering around with Horny and not letting Sid catch him alone. The day of their second game at home, Sid woke up with the sun shining blindingly through an errant crack in his blackout curtains and pulled his phone out of its dock and sent Geno a text: **come over after morning skate?**

Geno didn’t reply until Sid was in the car on his way to the rink, drinking a blood smoothie concoction at stoplights. **you come over**

Well. Maybe it would be a good gesture—to come to Geno on his own terms.

Sid drove to Geno’s after doing some plyo work with Andy, his limbs loose, but his whole body jittering all over like it hadn’t since he was well and truly alive. He hadn’t even stopped in the lounge to make liquid lunch, after, and he hoped that this would go well, and he wouldn’t have to go home and suck down another bowl of bloody tomato puree and stare out the window at his still-covered pool in frustration.

Geno answered the door in gym shorts and a hooded sweatshirt, one that Sid vaguely recognized as something that he owned. Maybe he had left it here and Geno had picked it up by mistake. He wasn’t going to say anything, but it made him feel warm inside, and he only just resisted bursting into a big, hopeful smile.

“Hey,” he said instead, raising his hand in a friendly wave, casual, totally neutral. “Hope I’m not interrupting your nap.”

“Eh,” Geno shrugged, and gestured him inside and shut and locked the door behind him. “I’m not need so much, now.”

Sid toed off his sneakers and set them neatly next to the pile of Geno’s shoes and wandered further inside the house, his stomach rumbling a little, following the smell of synthetic blood to the living room, where Geno was fussing with a blanket on the couch, a steaming mug sitting on the table, sans coaster, no doubt leaving a ring.

“You want?” Geno asked, gesturing to it. “I just microwave, but there’s more.”

“No, no—“ Sid said, and smoothed his pants out awkwardly with his clammy palms and sat down gingerly in the center of the couch, so that Geno would be all but forced to sit nearby. “C’mon, sit.”

Geno looked a bit suspicious, but he dropped the blanket and circled around to sit on Sid’s left, close enough that their knees were touching; he smelled like the deodorant from the rink, and like curry powder, and a little bit like himself beneath it, the sweet remembered smell. Sid swallowed.

“What you want talk to me about?” Geno asked, after Sid let the silence stretch too long. He took a sip from his mug, holding his body up against the couch arm, carefully tilted away.

“I wanted to apologize, for what I said to you--“ Sid said, and shifted his hands around, tugging at the hem of his shirt, fiddling with his watch strap. “It was stupid of me not to listen to you, what you wanted, you know?” He scratched nervously at his neck, watching Geno’s long fingers lift the mug to his mouth again, unfairly distracting.

“It’s stupid,“ Geno said, as if Sid needed reminding, and leaned over to set the mug on the table, folding his empty hands in his lap. “It’s hurt me, you know? All the time you remind me what it’s like--when you drink from me before, and I’m in love, but. Feels like you don’t care, you know?”

  
“I do care,“ Sid said, and swallowed hard around the dry lump in his throat and rested his palm on Geno’s bent thigh above his knee. “And listen, I think I was wrong, before--when I said you weren’t ready. I think I just--”

“You don’t listen,” Geno said, dropping his hand gingerly atop Sid’s own.

“Yeah,” Sid said. “I didn’t.”

“I know what you mean, little bit, though,” Geno said, then. “Before I’m not really think much, like--I want be vampire because you, and I’m not think like, ‘oh, it’s hard, painful,’ you know? But I see little bit, now.” He laughed then, soft and a little sad, looking down at their overlapped hands with a tired shrug. “It’s hard.”

“Listen, Geno, I,” Sid said, feeling warmed, every vein, by Geno’s words. He wasn’t sure how to say what he wanted to say next. It was so much, everything tangled up inside of him. “I know that it might not be the right time, or maybe ever, and feel free to tell me to fuck off and we can just go back to--being friends, but.” He paused to breathe in, and tried to look forward, right in Geno’s eyes. “I really want to try, again, if you want to.”

  
The silence that followed was agonizing, Geno’s quiet breaths, the buzz of the kitchen fan in the background. Sid shut his eyes and hoped and prayed that Geno wouldn’t get up and leave and tell him that it was better if they just went back to how things were, because it sucked, and Sid had realized that maybe it was safe, the confines of their professional friendship, but it was the last thing he wanted.

  
Geno didn’t say anything, but when Sid opened his eyes again, Geno was looking back at him, his eyes bright and warm and glassy. He looked like a possibility, and Sid’s heart tried very hard to beat.

“Geno?” he asked, after the silence dragged on long enough that he thought he might drown in it. Sid only really had one more gesture left, one more way to wear his heart on his sleeve. He pulled his hand away from Geno’s and raised it up to unzip the half zip on his shirt the rest of the way and folded the collar under itself and tilted his neck slightly, the skin bare and uncovered, a clear invitation. “Please?”

“Sid—“ Geno said, his voice close, warm against Sid’s ear. Sid held so fucking still, tilting his head defiantly, feeling his cheeks try to heat and burn with the blood from that morning’s breakfast. Geno put his hands on the back of Sid’s neck and the space where his collar was tucked in, pulling it away a little more. He bent close and pressed his mouth to Sid’s skin and just stayed there; his lips were soft and wet, still a little warm from his lunch.

“You serious?” Geno asked, the words and the scrape of his mustache tickling Sid’s skin. “You want like--not just play around, you want?”

“Yes, I—“ Sid said, and he could feel the itch of Geno’s fangs dropping down a little, sliding against him as he opened his mouth. “I want a fresh start, Geno--any way you want to have it, anything.”

Geno clutched at him harder, hand in his shirt and his hair, and didn’t say anything at all and just bit down, so slowly and precisely that Sid thought he might never bottom out. Sid felt himself becoming liquid, just a remnant of a human person. Was this how Geno had felt, all those times, slumping like slow syrup into Sid’s hands? Sid could recall the feeling of being bitten here; he’d let other vampires get their hands on him over the years for fun or play. But it had never been like _this_.

Geno’s big hand slipped under his collar to explore his chest and tangle in his necklace. He wished that he were human and Geno could feel the rush of his heart rabbiting in his chest, telling Geno everything he needed to know, but instead everything was just still. His blood was rushing out of him in slow, languid gulps—and he knew that Geno was drinking for pleasure rather than hunger. Sid’s own fangs were dropped down now, full inside his mouth.

“God,” he said, and slid his head back against the couch cushion and dragged Geno with him a little, until Geno grabbed his shoulder to keep him upright and pulled his fangs free, lapping messily at the wound like a long, slow kiss. Sid’s body was jello and his brain was foggy. He wanted Geno to do it again immediately.

He turned his head, Geno’s palm still warm against his chest. Geno's mouth was bloody and red, his fangs long and poking out from below his upper lip. “Hey,” Sid said, and brought his own hand up to hold Geno’s scruffy chin in his fingers and guided their lips together, licking into his mouth, their fangs clacking together a little as Sid tasted his own blood.

“Sid,” Geno said, pulling back a little and grabbing both of Sid’s hands between his own, holding them between their bodies. His face looked concerned, creases accenting his forehead and around his mouth. Sid felt the cloud of possibility hanging low above them. “I’m hurt, but--I want try, with you.”

“Oh, Geno—“ Sid said, looking down at their joined hands and back up. He felt a smile spreading wide across his face, his fangs sharp and gleaming, unable to help it. “I’m--I’m glad.”

They were both quiet for a moment, sitting there and wading around in it, that bloody, floaty feeling that Sid would love to get used to.

After a bit, Geno looked down and away and back up again. “Sid?” he asked. “Why you never want turn me, before? Why you don’t believe it’s real?”

“I didn’t—“ Sid said, rubbing his thumb over Geno’s knuckles. “I was just pretty scared, I guess—you were so young, and I always worried, because I was too young when it happened to me, you know? Maybe it’s not all it’s chalked up to be, this undead thing. Maybe you’ll get sick of me, eventually, when we can’t just play hockey forever.”

“Maybe,” Geno said, and smirked, and shook Sid’s hands in his grip. “Play hockey forever though, for sure. We three hundred and we have ten thousand points, very impressive.”

“Only ten thousand?” Sid asked, looking at Geno with suspicion. They could certainly have a better record than that if they played for three hundred years. Geno was selling them way short.

Sid sat there for a moment, just looking at Geno’s face, the soft lines of it, his big nose, his still-bloody fangs, the way he would look for the rest of forever. He didn’t want to stop looking, but the clock read later than he had thought, and he had a routine to get through before the game tonight, and not enough hours to do it in.

“Maybe you drink from me, too—“ Geno said, when Sid let go of his hands and stood up to readjust himself in his pants. His expression was sweet and open, drunk on the closeness and Sid’s blood. Hopefully he could still take his nap now.

“Maybe uh—maybe not today,” Sid said, scratching a hand through his hair, watching Geno watch his hands. Sid felt far too overwhelmed to even imagine controlling himself. Just thinking about it was— “I don’t think I can—I’ve been thinking about it for—for a while—I’m probably gonna take too much.”

Geno ducked his head forward and groaned. “Sid—“ he said. Sid knew the feeling. He wanted nothing more than to let Geno tug him down to the couch and suck him dry and not come out for a week. The rest of the team could pull it off for them, surely.

“Soon,” Sid said, and bent down to take Geno’s face in between his palms, delighting in the unusually warm flush of his face, running his hands down Geno’s neck and over his sweatshirt that was definitely Sid’s. “I really want to.”

“Soon,” Geno said, and he wouldn’t release Sid until he was thoroughly kissed and Sid’s fangs had dropped. He would need to adjust himself again when he got back to his car.

“I’ll see you at the game, eh?” Sid said, as he put his shoes back on. He kissed Geno again, who had followed him down into the foyer, letting him bite a little too rough at Sid’s lower lip in a way that Sid loved and wanted to do about ten thousand more times.

“We win again, now,” Geno said, when he released him, a hand still clutching the hem of Sid’s shirt. “Win for sure.”

“For sure,” Sid said, and smiled at him, bright and warm, with all his teeth.

—

They did win, in five more games, and Sid felt so overwhelmingly, incandescently happy that his fangs were dropped down fully by the time he accepted the Cup, the shiny gleaming metal, cool in his hands. He felt like maybe he was floating, his lips against the glassy inscriptions, only the ice reflected in it when he looked. Everyone around him was shouting; someone somewhere shoved a crisp, new hat over his sweat-soaked head.

He couldn’t remember anything that he said in any of the interviews, all he was doing was looking at Geno, his neck wet with sweat, flushed red from some scrape. Sid watched him take at least twelve different selfies with Hags and Duper from the same exact angle, and eventually he skated over and put a bare hand on both of their backs and asked, “Everything good here boys?”

“Better with you, cap,” Hags said, and pressed him in close, tucking him under Geno’s outstretched arm. After the photo-taking was over, he looked up to find Geno looking back at him.

“Tonight?” Sid asked, knowing that Geno would know what he was getting at. Maybe they could sneak off later, back to the hotel where Sid could lay Geno out and drink more than enough of his fill.

“Yes,” Geno said, and pulled his arm back and skated away, because the margin for unabashed affection was wider after you’d won it all, surely, but they both knew not to push.

The locker room after was a cacophony of shouting and popping champagne, and Sid was drenched in seconds, passed around from teammate to teammate, staring at Geno laughing through the spray and the noise. Geno had a whole bottle in his hand, and he kept tipping it back, his eyes locked with Sid’s. Maybe if he drank enough, his blood might taste fizzy, and sweet—surely the sweetest thing that Sid’s lips would ever touch.

It didn’t take long before they ended up smashed together at the very eye of the storm, the room quickly filling with more and more people, players and staff and loved ones, everyone in various states of inebriation and undress. When Geno bumped into Sid’s back, he was stripped all the way down to his compression shorts and his drenched t-shirt, and Sid looked up at his beaming fang-filled smile and down across the line of his body, his joy seeping off him in thick waves, and he knew he couldn’t wait.

“Now?” he asked, leaning up and cupping his hand around Geno’s ear. He wanted it so bad, maybe more than he’d ever wanted anything else, maybe even more than he’d wanted the Cup again. He could only admit it to himself now, when he felt like maybe everything was possible, everything he wanted to have.

“So happy,” Geno said, shouting over the noise, happy and hoarse, his scruffy cheek sliding across Sid’s ear. Around them, everyone was a swirling mess, no one paying them any mind.

He planted his face in Geno’s neck, smiling so hard it hurt, and felt Geno’s arm come up to hold him there, his hands clutching at Sid’s wet jersey. He was so—it was everything.

A continuation, a fresh start.

Geno’s neck tasted like salt and champagne when he kissed the skin, open-mouthed. His teeth had been dropped so long that they were sore, now. “I’m so happy,” he said into Geno’s skin, still smiling like a fucking idiot. “I’m gonna—“

Geno’s hands held him harder, and Sid felt someone splashing beer or something all over the place, drenching his socked feet, and he didn’t even care. “Do it,” he heard Geno whisper.

So he did.


End file.
